[rpd] Accountability assessment - PDP review?

[Owen DeLong]

> On Oct 25, 2016, at 3:50 PM, sm+afrinic at elandsys.com wrote:
> 
> Hi Omo,
> At 00:05 25-10-2016, Omo Oaiya wrote:
>> While the new PDP succeeded in addressing #1 and #2, it has not addressed #3 and #4.
> 
> [snip]
> 
>> - It also did not describe the process for determining "rough consensus".
> 
> [snip]
> 
>> The policy discussions at AFRINIC-24 is a perfect illustration.  Another easy example is that since AFRINIC-24, there has been little discussion on proposals which were sent back on mailing list for further discussions as per meeting minutes (http://www.afrinic.net/en/library/policies/archive/ppm-minutes/1847-afrinic-24-pdwgpdp-minutes) and no action from the working group co-chairs.
> 
> Thank you for sharing the link to the minutes.  I was waiting to read about what happened at that meeting.  I gather that the the Working Group Chairs did not consider it useful to share it on this mailing list.  There is a mistake in Section 2 of the minutes.
> 
> At the end of the meeting, the CEO of Afrinic Ltd commented that the way consensus was taken looks like voting.  I agree with that comment.

Well… It is difficult to measure consensus in any way that doesn’t at least to some extent look like voting. The main difference between measuring consensus and voting really comes in what you do with the numbers at the end.

Consensus being a lack of sustained opposition and rough consensus being a situation where the opposition has been clearly heard and addressed to the extent practical such that any remaining opposition is a clear minority that cannot be reasonably accommodated, any mechanism to establish whether or not there is support amongst those present is likely to resemble some form of voting, polling, etc.

Owen