• @electrodynamica
    link
    22 years ago

    Some more context I just remembered (funny how things come in waves):

    Notice that I always say Mastodon devs and don’t name particular people. Part of that is out of respect and to keep it from seeming personal, but another important thing is that there were several Mastodon devs involved in the committee.

    So when I say that there was a clear majority that means several Mastodon devs had a vote and they still lost.

    But what happens in committee is people are allowed to argue for or against motions. At times, there would only be one person willing to argue on one side while several Mastodon devs would argue on the other.

    So even if there was a majority vote numerically, there was a larger perceived dissent that would prevent motions from passing.

    One chair was more affected by this than the other but again out of respect I won’t say which.

    This is important to understanding why standards committees sometimes have undesirable outcomes. It’s also one of the reasons why sometimes groups committee shop and prefer W3C or IEEE or any of the others.

    Standards committees is actually one of humanity’s society’s biggest unsolved problems. 🙃