n>>>>> "G" == G Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> writes:
G> Neither you nor he, therefore, is well placed to present a
G> (presumptively neutral) summary of the discussion. (Neither am
G> I.)
Branden, I'd like to push back on the idea that we want a summary from
someone neutral.
If we have that luxury--for example if we have a facilitator of
consensus building who happens not to have a strong opinion related to
the current consensus--that's great.
However, summaries are critical to consensus-building discussions.
We cannot have them without summaries.
The summaries are where someone tries to capture where we are and see
if it "sticks."
I think we're now all able to see what happens when people think the
summary didn't capture the discussion--it didn't stick.
This will advance the discussion far more than if each of us walked away
from the discussion making our own assumptions about where we reached
without sharing those assumptions. As an example of why that's bad, the
decision to originally enable usrmerge in debootstrap cited a
debian-devel consensus that was never summarized. Putting it mildly,
some people viewed the existence of that consensus differently than the
people proposing the debootstrap change. If that consensus had been
summarized--even by someone who was not neutral--we would have
discovered a disconnect much sooner. We might have been able to avoid
significant bad blood.
So, I absolutely think Andrew was in a position to summarize, and if he
didn't I hope you or I or someone else would have chosen to do so.
I'm very glad he did.
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