I don’t need to imagine it. I have seen it happen more than once and chalked it up to just how some communities work.

The number of other wg chairs and various other ripe regulars that suddenly found themselves in the aawg room, probably for the first time for most of them, during an AOB session introduced agenda item to boot Richard Cox from his co chair role was one such example.

--srs

Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote on 09/05/2020 15:23:
> Having one might at least lay this discussion to rest once and for all.
> I’ve seen variants of it for several years now.

But imagine if someone contacted a bunch of their colleagues and said:
"look, there's this policy proposal going on in RIPE AAWG and it would
be really great if you could just join up on the mailing list and add in
a +1, thanks!"

Therein lies the problem - or at least one of the problems - with
voting: it's wide open to manipulation.

There is another way of looking at this stalemate though: there's a
policy development process and it produces outcomes. The outcomes may
not be what some individuals on the WG want, but they are clear outcomes
all the same.

In the sense that you're concerned that there's stalemate regarding some
of these proposals, there isn't according to the PDP: no consensus is a
legitimate and clear outcome, and when there is no consensus, the policy
does not proceed.

So the issue is more: why are newer versions of this policy proposal
returning repeatedly, and are they dealing adequately with the things
that are blocking consensus?

It's surprising to see a third iteration of this policy proposal - the
first two versions didn't look like they were going anywhere. But
resubmitting new versions is an issue between the WG chairs and the
proposer.

Nick