[rpd] Policy Proposal: PDP Working Group (WG) Guidelines and Procedures - Draft03 (PDWG Chair)

[Owen DeLong]

>> 
>> [Jordi] Actually not. If proposal A get consensus declared before proposal B, even if you include in the CPM A, then B, what remains is the text of B. That will be according to the PDP. Never mind if A and B declaration of consensus happens with 2 years of difference or just 2 hours. So, in the worst case, if in a single meeting there are 2 competing and conflicting proposals, the chairs have the attribution to decide which one goes last, so that one will prevail. Exactly the same way in the IETF we have documents that update the previous ones!
>  
> This assumes that to be the desired outcome of the community.
>  
> If A and B achieve consensus at the same meeting, I’m not convinced that is necessarily the case, since the order of consensus is determined not by community preference, but merely the order in which they were placed on the agenda.
>  
> [Jordi] The order in the agenda should be irrelevant (ideally it should be FIFO, first proposal submitted/update, first to be presented), but besides that, what it matters is the determination of consensus, which not necessarily must match the order in the agenda. They chairs shall do the consensus determination following FIFO.

Do you really see that likely to get implemented flawlessly given previous track record?
 
> Further, what remains is not B, what remains is the original text as modified by A with the modifications from B then applied against that. 
>  
> For example, consider if we had a policy text that contains “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’s back.”
>  
> Proposal A changes the brown fox to a purple rabbit.
>  
> Proposal B changes the color of the fox from brown to green and changes the dog into a horse.
>  
> Now, let us consider your suggested outcome in light of:
>  
>                 Agenda covers policy A first then B…
>                                 “The quick green rabbit jumped over the lazy horse’s back.”
>  
>                 Agenda covers policy B first, then A…
>                                 “The quick purple rabbit jumped over the lazy horse’s back.”
>  
> I think we can agree that making the overall policy outcome dependent on the order in which proposals were discussed at a meeting is probably not the ideal result. Further, I think the above shows that this could become a recipe for policies that make no sense, since both proposals were written with the intent of modifying the original language and neither took the other into account.
>  
> [Jordi] it all depends on how you take it. When a policy reach consensus it needs to be updated in the CPM, but if 5 minutes after another proposal reached also consensus, the CPM change is still not done, the last one will prevail. We need to isolate the timing in between two proposals from the “at the minute” CPM status, otherwise, we will be treating in a different way proposals presented in the same meeting from proposals presented at different meetings, which will be unfair.

The last one will only prevail to the extent that it makes changes to language which still exists. If it makes changes to text which no longer exists, the outcome is ambiguous at best.

This is why I think there should be an inherent obligation on either the author of the last proposal to provide text addressing how such conflicts should be addressed if both proposals reach consensus, or in the alternative, a requirement for the co-chairs to find some consensus in the community for how that is to be handled.

Blindly implementing both sets of text, even if a deterministic order can be defined will not meet expectations and is very likely to lead to unintended consequences.

>  
>>  
>> If this version missed the deadline, then it missed the deadline. We really need to stop arbitrarily making process exceptions without considering the unintended consequences which may well extend beyond just the bad precedent you describe above. It may effectively disenfranchise participants in the process because they did not expect the late arriving policy to be considered, so they don’t attend the relevant session or they are otherwise unprepared to fully engage on it due to the short timeline.
>>  
>> [Jordi] There may be an English misinterpretation of the PDP here. But my reading is that “No change can be made to a draft policy within one week of the meeting”, if the meeting starts on 17th, means that you can’t send a proposal after 9th noon, because the week before the meeting is 10th to 16th. How do you see that as English native speaker?
>  
> In general, I would interpret it to mean that the text is frozen effectively 168 hours prior to the start of the meeting. Rounding up to include the midnight prior to that point also strikes me as a valid interpretation.
>  
> [Jordi] So then a proposal submitted at 15:00 or so of the 10th, is out of the process, clearly. This  is the same interpretation for an Spanish speaker using English.

Yep.

Owen

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