voting, surveys, juries, spec splitting

In highly contentious environments, one failure mode
for "voting" is that attempts to vote descend into 
arguments about the nature of the question.

At least in juries, the question has been put and
there are rules about the scope of the arguments
given and legitimate modes of discourse; the
chair (judge) has some power to control
arguments and rule some topics out of order.

In this case, some members of the committee
continue to want  to debate the normative
nature of specifications--should they eventually be
moved to Recommendation--when the question raised 
is actually whether to publish the specification as
FPWD in order to promote wider review.

The question isn't  whether the markup spec
is useful. The question is whether the working
group should publish it as FPWD. Repeating a
misstatement of the question in twitterland
isn't particularly helpful to resolving the 
actual question.

Pointing out the discrepancy between the question asked
and the arguments given hasn't been useful so
far; I am trying not to repeat myself.

Larry
-- 
http://larry.masinter.net

Received on Wednesday, 28 January 2009 16:55:16 UTC