At 09:38 24/06/98 +1000, vicc§cia.net.au wrote:
>It stuned and surprised me that Robert Elz admited
>to not know how to determine if consensus exists or how
>to go about buidling consensus. It was decided that Ausbone
>of which I am a director was to be managed by consensus.
>in other words a member driven organisation, not a board
>driven organisation.
>


Well, can we define a majority accepted view, that Robert can accept as
expressing the consensus view he needs in order to be comfortable with
handing operational and/or policy control in the .AU namepace to some new
body/entity?

It seems to me that a great way of asserting agreement about a new
structure to provide oversight on policy and/or operations in the .AU
namespace would be to use this very list, which surely constitutes the
overwhelming majority of interested parties at this point, as a voting
source? 

In other words, Robert, would a process with a measurable outcome (for
instance, an electronic vote, one vote per person, held by polling members
of this list) in which the vote was at least 80% in favour of a specific
outcome, be sufficient for you to deem it to be 'consensus' and to agree to
it?

The point I'm trying to make is that if we all know, up front, the manner
in which we'll be able to achieve your agreement that the 'community' wants
to use a specific approach, then we can work towards that, and know that
there is a definitely achievable outcome if our work is agreed to by that
overwhelming majority (but accepting that it'll be unlikely to gain 100.0%
agreement)

If I'm off of the mark here, what is "on" the mark, in terms of a way to
get your endorsement of 'something' as the acceptable path for us to move
forward?

Cheers,
   Simon

---
Simon Hackett, Technical Director, Internode Systems Pty Ltd
31 York St [PO Box 284, Rundle Mall], Adelaide, SA 5000 Australia
Email: simon§internode.com.au  Web: http://www.on.net
Phone: +61-8-8223-2999          Fax: +61-8-8223-1777