Re: voting, surveys, juries, spec splitting

On Jan 28, 2009, at 8:54 AM, Larry Masinter wrote:

>
> 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.

I think if we put the question to a group vote, it should be something  
like:

Shall the group publish HTML5: A Markup Language (with link to latest  
Editor's Draft) as a First Public Working Draft?

[ ] Yes
[ ] No
[ ] Yes, but only with changes

Justification: [ ----------------- ]
If you requested changes, describe here: [ ---------------- ]

Does anyone feel such a statement of the question is unduly biased?

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Thursday, 29 January 2009 00:34:22 UTC