About

Rough Consensus is the student blog of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII). It began in January of 2012, and is open to posts from all current graduate students at the OII.

We come from different academic, social, and cultural backgrounds, but we share a concern for the same issues:

• Social/political impact of the internet
• Internet/communication policy

These topics have been discussed in the past, they're discussed now elsewhere, and they'll be discussed in the future. But in our opinion, the writings that most people see are either too boring ("too technical" if you are being diplomatic) or too simplified to effectively communicate what we consider important.

We'd like to try to break down the boring while leaving the important.

We rarely all agree on anything, but we respect civility, data, and well-argued theory. We write for an educated audience interested in communication issues, but we try not to assume any topic specific background knowledge.

Our name was inspired from David Clark's quote (when describing the Internet Engineering Task Force's decision making process): "We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code."

DISCLAIMER: Any opinions expressed in blog posts are those of the specific bloggers, not the OII. Any comments should be read with the consideration that comments can be anonymous here.