John Cowan clarified the JTC1 process: > The result of a > "no" vote is that the process loops until all such votes are resolved.
All comments on a formal JTC1 ballot receive a *disposition*. As far as possible, that disposition is done by committee consensus, which usually means, in practice, the avoidance of strongly held objections by the participants. Creating a disposition does not necessarily mean that a comment is *resolved*, however, as a comment may turn out to be ill-formed, ambiguous, irreconcilable, or balanced against an opposite view by some other national body's comments. The process proceeds until the maximal formal consensus can be achieved on the ballots -- which doesn't necessarily mean that all the No votes are resolved to Yes votes -- just as many as prove feasible, given the votes, the comments, and the in committee responses by the national body representatives. > If consensus cannot be reached, the proposal is eventually > dropped, I suppose. Note that consensus does not necessarily mean unanimity, although unanimity is, of course, the best sign of consensus. A *proposal* which does not have some kind of consensus generally never makes it into formal ballotting. Once a CD (Committee Draft) or an Amendment is in formal ballotting, it generally proceeds ahead to publication, although it may require extra rounds of ballotting and ballot comment resolution, if it proves particularly contentious. An excellent example of such a process of repeated substantial reworking and reballotting was the original completion of ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 itself. That took many years and multiple ballots to complete, and along the way took a fair amount of out-of-the-box thinking and some fancy footwork to garner sufficient consensus to progress the document to the status of International Standard. People whose ideas of committee decision making revolve around Robert's Rules of Order and recorded motions with yea or nay voting may find the JTC1 committee processes somewhat arcane and baffling in practice. --Ken
