pull down to refresh

In particular, the IETF is supposed not to be run by a "majority rule" philosophy. This is why we engage in rituals like "humming" instead of voting. However, more and more of our actions are now indistinguishable from voting, and quite often we are letting the majority win the day without consideration of minority concerns. This document explains some features of rough consensus, what is not rough consensus, how we have gotten away from it, how we might think about it differently, and the things we can do in order to really achieve rough consensus.
I saw this shared in some covenant upgrade discussions and I hadn't encountered it before. IETF stands for Internet Engineering Task Force which decides on technical standards for the internet protocol (eg tcp/ip). I usually forget about all the past work that can be drawn on to gain insight into present problems and it looks like bitcoin consensus isn't much different.
Is anyone aware of any other good reads on technical consensus like this? I suspect they'd mostly originate from standards bodies?
I haven’t come across anything about coming to a consensus instead of majority rule for technical decisions in the internet world for protocols. They usually don’t talk about that phase of the technical design decisions. Majority rule democracy has been called mob rule by some in the past and in the US we specifically guard against strict majority rule. The minority also has rights, at least, in this country.
reply
It has some references, one of which is a book on religion awesomely Beyond Majority Rule: Voteless Decisions in the Religious Society of Friends ... I'm always looking for new things I don't give myself the time to read.
reply
I find it super fascinating how decentralized protocols have managed to approach problem solving in a way that doesn't relegate minority concerns to background, which is a flaw in traditional democracies.
reply