"Justin Erenkrantz" <justin@erenkrantz.com> writes:
> On 3/6/06, Stefan Haller <haller@ableton.com> wrote:
> > I'm told that this patch won't be committed because no consensus was
> > reached. Frankly, my impression was that a consensus *was* reached:
> > many people gave good reasons why the patch is useful, and you stopped
> > arguing against them. But apparently that's not what people call
> > "consensus" here, so I'm unsure how to proceed with this issue.
>
> Consensus is when everyone agrees.
Yes, sort of.
Consensus and voting are not the same thing; consensus and 100%
agreement are not quite the same thing either.
Consensus is what happens when someone says "Do we have consensus on
XYZ?" and no one claims otherwise (after a reasonable period has
elapsed for people to check their mail, of course.) Thus consensus
can mean some people want XYZ to happen, and others don't object
enough to stand in the way, even though they might not be enthusiastic
supporters.
This is the working definition we've been using forever, as far as I
know. I've posted it on this list before, but unfortunately it's hard
to find the right SIP to track it down with a search engine. So I'm
reduced the embarrassing tactic of referring to my own book:
http://producingoss.com/html-chunk/consensus-democracy.html
(Maybe we should formalize this in hacking.html, but we've never
really needed to before.)
It's academic here, of course. We don't have consensus in this case,
Justin has clearly articulated why, so the answer is to discuss some
more, until someone thinks of a better solution or (perhaps) until
Justin decides he's convinced by what he hears. Voting should be very
rare, a last resort, especially on technical issues. Er, if I may:
http://producingoss.com/html-chunk/consensus-democracy.html#when-to-vote
I'm not citing these sections from my book as some sort of authority,
by the way, just as expanded explanations for what this email says in
shorter form.
-Karl
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Received on Tue Mar 7 21:22:11 2006