[sig-policy] Policy SIG meeting yesterday
Regarding the Policy SIG yesterday and more specifically proposal 042, after
getting some more feedback from some other folks and also sleeping on it,
I've to raise some concerns.
I know measuring consensus is not easy, but clearly consensus is not
unanimity and there was a clear superior number of people in favor than
opposing the proposal.
Furthermore, there were no negative comments in the mail exploder since it
was presented.
So, with all the respect, I think the achievement of consensus for this
policy should be reconsidered. Otherwise, we could also think that the
consensus in previous meetings, for other policy proposals (not naming any
in particular), has also never reached, as always there were comments and
votes against, and the consensus was declared when a similar proportion of
people was in favor vs. against.
Moreover, in my opinion, yesterday the personal and unpleasant attacks that
a single participant launched against me (not the proposals) created a clear
situation of breach of the process and some folks may have been predisposed
against the proponent, and thus influenced some which may have decided not
to vote at all, or even voting against the proposals as a way to vote
"against" the proponent, which is not the intent of the process.
I expect that this kind of situation is not allowed in future meetings,
hopefully. I think I was very kind in front of the attacks received, and
under other situations, such as using my own native language instead of
English, could have taken a very different reaction and become even more
rude that the attacker itself, which I not did also in order to respect the
rest of participants and try to play a fair game despite the situation.
It is clear that, all kind of respectful critics to discuss any proposal
merits are part of the process, are needed and welcome, and I fully support
them. However unpleasant comments as we had yesterday which even reached to
the point of not allowing the presenter to continue defending the proposal.
This has also a very negative impact towards the process and the people
participating, which under this kind of pressure could consider that is not
worth to invest the time in submitting a proposal and defending it, as they
can be "freely" attacked, specially in regions where because cultural
reasons, difficulties with the language, or any other reasons, participants
are typically shy and not precisely prone to speak up. I think it is a clear
manipulation of the process.
I also want to clarify the reason I had 4 proposals, as this was part of the
attack. Before the previous meeting I submitted a single proposal, and it
seems that it was considered complex to understand and to decide about it,
so following staff recommendations, I decided to split it in several, in
order to help the people to read them one by one and consider each part as a
simpler piece.
Also, part of the attack was about the waste of time, and in fact I think we
used about 60% of the time that was originally allocated for this. It was
not my intend to ask anyone to waste their time, but more on the other way,
facilitate all to understand the proposal and take a position about it, and
this is part of the process.
I believe that the most important think in this process is not to discourage
people, and what happened yesterday is clearly doing so. The process is not
set for or to allow attack people presenting, otherwise we are measuring the
presenter merits, not the proposal ones.
And last, but not least, in my humble opinion, delaying a proposal that in
my opinion reached consensus can be actually considered as a real "denial of
service" attack to the process and it means that all spend our time in
discussing it again when it is not really needed and acting unfairly among
different proposals.
Regards,
Jordi
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