
RFC 7282 – On Consensus and Humming in the IETF (2014) - Tomte
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7282
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zdw
Has anyone who has been at one of these meetings where humming occurred
comment on the social aspects of it?

It sounds like a less wordy, more vague version (as you can't visibly tell who
exactly is humming) of the "aye"/"nay" voice voting.

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cryptonector
We used to use a show of hands (raised hands). However, participants with
limited sight could not get a sense for the state of a room when a show of
hands was called for. So we switched to humming. Now, you might wonder how
that works for people who are hard of hearing, but oddly enough that has not
come up as much.

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cryptonector
If ever we have to, we could do both, and then still call it "humming" since
it would still be that and it's a very pithy (two syllables) word for it.

It's also possible that humming has little to do with sight and more to do
with using the volume of humming to help indicate the strength of the sense of
the room -- that actually is a very useful aspect of humming. However, humming
became a thing concommitantly with participation by people with limited sight,
which is probably why I remember that as a motivation, but in fact it might
not have been! It's been a long time now that the IETF uses humming...

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gcb0
I was halfway and, despite making a lot of sense, I had to stop to check if it
was published on the 1st of the month.

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cryptonector
Oh? Why is that?

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gcb0
aprils fool

