Since this comes up over and over again (see comments on mrose
document), we might wnat to talk explictely about this. Historically,
the IESG has been hestitant to use the term "voting" in what it does,
because of things that implies. (E.g., for ballots, "voting" is really
a way to make sure that sufficient ADs have looked at the document and
signed off. Absent formal voting, its hard to imagine how we'd do that
reliabily.)
Also, I think in the past, there was a fair amount of concern about
getting sued and how that would be easier/worse if we were formally
balloting things. We even hesitated to document our internal processes
(publically) because of this.
Over time, I think we've moved away from this (e.g., ID tracker makes
balloting pretty explicit). The reality is that we come close to
voting in practice on a lot of things, and the community know this and
believes it to be the case.
Note that the iesg-charter document (also on today's agenda) also uses
the word "vote". Does it need to be stricken from there? Or do we need
to add a paragraph explaining how IESG "votes" are not "votes" in a
bad sense? It is hard in practice to not use the term vote at all,
because in practice that is what we seem to be doing.
Thomas