I share an office with Brett McDowell, who is the Executive Director of the FIDO Alliance, and who has lots of experience "with IETF, ISO, ITU-T, ANSI, OASIS, W3C, IEEE and the ETSI ICT Standards Board."
He's not a coder, he spends his time working on consensus, process, politics, etc-- all the stuff us coders tend to hate (but is necessary for mature real-world technologies).
I asked about his experience with standards-setting meetings-- my only experience is with the ISO standards process (which is horrible and bureaucratic and a path we do NOT want to go down)-- and our discussion made me even more pessimistic about the upcoming Montreal meeting. I'm hoping maybe we can have a little pre-meeting discussion that might make next week's meeting more productive for everybody.
A few things that came out of my discussion with Brett:
It would make sense if the first meeting was all about gathering requirements. But there needs to be somebody neutral (and trusted to be neutral) to do the gathering, and commit to producing a document describing what was discussed / agreed. When he says 'requirements' he means both very specific things (maybe "solution must be compatible with existing mining hardware") and non-specific (e.g. "solution must be acceptable to nine of the biggest eleven Bitcoin exchanges").
If there is a meeting where solutions are presented, there must be time for everybody to digest and discuss them. And there needs to be a well-defined, accepted process and timeline for deciding on a solution.
So... I'm looking for a pep-talk. I didn't sign the "letter from developers" because I didn't agree with the conclusion: I'm NOT confident that more discussion will lead to consensus. But I REALLY hope I'm wrong about that.
Is there something I can do between now and the meeting, or something I can say or do at the meeting, that will help? I'm not currently planning on presenting anything at the meeting, I plan on listening-- I think everybody already knows what I think, I haven't been shy about sharing my opinions.
Are there some things we can agree on in advance that might help make progress?
Reply directly to me if you've got advice for me or just want to vent, reply-all if you have thoughts about overall process/governance/etc.... (and meeting organizers, feel free to tell me everything is under control and you've done this before and it'll be great.....)
There exists more than one layer of consensus at play here.
Bitcoin has a set technical features. Changing that feature set involves a consensus process and that's what everybody is focusing on.
What is being missed is that the determination about to what degree, if at all, the set of features as a whole or any one in particular is valuable is a completely different consensus process.
Bitcoin's technical features have no value unless people are willing to accept Bitcoin as money. Bitcoin exists in a state of perpetual competition with every other form of money in existence.
The most distressing thing I've witnessed in the process of this debate (really, for the last few years) are prominent developers completely dismissing the interests of Bitcoin users as being unworthy of consideration.
For all their supposed intellectual achievement, these developers apparently can not or will not recognize that their success is measured only by the degree to which the people whose concerns they hold in disdain voluntarily agree to accept their product.
For Bitcoin to survive as a project and as a currency, it has to be sold to users who have a choice of many alternatives. Every feature in Bitcoin needs to be justified in terms of how it makes Bitcoin into better money so that people will freely choose to use it. That process is hindered, not aided, by people who publicly say, "shut up and obey the people who are smarter than you."