Re: Engineering our way out of a brown paper bag [Re: Consensus based on reading tea leaves]

[Stewart Bryant <stbryant at cisco.com>]

Brian E Carpenter wrote:

> Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
>
> > --On mandag, januar 02, 2006 18:10:15 +0200 Yaakov Stein 
> > <yaakov_s at rad.com> wrote:
> >
> > > The only thing I am sure about is
> > > that
> > > consensus on this list is for keeping everything exactly as it is.
> >
> >
> >
> > I'm pretty sure there's no such consensus.
> >
> > I do, however, see a rather strong consensus-of-the-speakers against 
> > using MS-Word document format for anything "official".
>
>
> I think we need to tackle this whole issue, if we do decide to
> tackle it, in a much more systematic way.

I am in favour of any practical method that allows us to progress towards
the best tools for the job.

My personal end-goal is simple: I want us to be able to use modern
graphical techniques in normative text to help me to describe problems
and their solutions. There are many other nice-to-have's, but at the end
of the day it is the diagrams that are the key missing feature in
our document process.

The following would be a fine set up steps on the way to
determining the way forward. Perhaps my co-authors and I should
attempt another draft with this structure.

> - what are our functional requirements?
> - which of them are not met today?
> - what are the possible solutions, and what is their practical
>   and operational cost?
> - which, if any, solutions should we adopt, on what timescale?
>
> I believe that if we took a systematic approach like that, the issue
> of how we determine consensus would be broken into enough small
> steps that it really wouldn't be an issue.

Maybe.

The discussion on the list illustrates the well known problem
of determining consensus in the presence of highly vocal members
of the IETF community. This, as I recall,  is a problem that was
discussed some time ago in the "Miss Manners" talk. However it is 
separate problem from the issue of document formats and
should be addressed as a different work item.

- Stewart

>     Brian
>
>
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