Over the past year or so there's been an increase in the number of people responding to working group last calls with "I support as a co-author." This is a request to stop.
By the time a document enters working group last call, presumably the authors are familiar with its contents and don't have serious disagreements with them. Because "I support as a co-author" introduces little-to-no new information it's difficult to conclude that the reason that it's being posted has something to do with voting. We don't vote. (One hopes the reason isn't that the co-author has just read the document for the first time and finds it agreeable). The IETF makes decisions through a process of rough consensus, and this doesn't mean counting a show of hands, counting "yes" postings, or counting "I support this as a co-author" posts. Decisions are made on the basis of technical discussion and agreement with the technical contents of a document. This decision- making process can be confusing to people who haven't worked in consensus-oriented environments before, and if you haven't already read Pete Resnick's internet draft on consensus processes in the IETF, you may want to take a look at it. It's well-written and does a good job of capturing what it is that we're doing when we have last call on a document or ask other questions of working group participants. That document is here: http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-resnick-on-consensus/ In the meantime, when we have last call on a document, the co-authors should avoid posting their opinion on whether or not they support publication unless they take the probably surprising position of not supporting publishing the document. In that case they should definitely speak up. Many thanks, Melinda _______________________________________________ OPSAWG mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/opsawg
