Colleagues, in this I only address the decision making form questions, as I see them. What happens after the regional organization has made a decision is not addressed here. Two issues, if not a third, are present in this exchange. There are two mechanisms for decision making, voting, by participants with standing to vote, and consensus, again, by participants with standing to participate in a consensus call. First, for which questions is which mechanism determined? Second, is access to the mailing list alone sufficient to establish standing for either? The latent third issue is assuming that the answer to the second is in the negative, does advocacy by actors lacking standing, presented as such, or presented as some other form of social interaction, but delivered undifferentiated from those having standing, have a substantial possibility of affecting consensus outcomes? My personal experience, after three decades of decision making by consensus in the IETF, and earlier in AFSC organized organizations, is that the body on occasion determines the outcomes. To give an example, at IETFs 50 and 51 a small group of engineers from CNNIC presented a proposal to the IDN WG to fix a known problem in the Unicode table for Chinese. An "intermediate table". There was not consensus that a problem existed, and therefore that the fix should be adopted. A globally incorrect engineering decision was made by a locally correct cost-benefit analysis -- few if any of the contributors to the IDN WG were native Chinese language literate. A "vote" would have recorded what even "rough consensus" obscures, that of the votes for intermediate tables, all of the voters were professionally engaged in the deliver of Han script characters to Han script users, and that of the votes against intermediate tables, none of the voters were so engaged. Incidently, and simply as an item of historical trivia, I was, along with Erik Huizer and Dave Crocker, an engaged contributor to the POISSON WG, which authored RFC 2418, and which Scott Bradner was kind enough to edit. It was about as long, though not quite as contentuous, as the ICANN VI WG. Turning to the question of standing, whether to participate in a consensus call or a vote, not everyone in who "contributes" to the IETF actually has "standing". Reputation matters. No matter how often Jim Flemming posts on the amazing features of IPv8, no one pays him the slightest attention. The situation exists today in the IDNA mailing list, as a collection of cranks attempt to promote their quite daft "multilingual" agenda as an IETF/ICANN text. As a regional organization, residence in the region matters, it can not be ignored without harm to the least of the region's participating residents. With that I'm calling it a day with a quote from former Ops Area Director Randy Bush, concerning routing infrastructure proposals, sent to NANOG a few days ago: The goal is education and understanding, not a contest. These are all good and interesting approaches. Weapons are not allowed, we all work for the Internet. Eric