Flamefests on technical topics

Just catching up on email since I've been offline since Thursday, I see the firewall/tunneling over HTTP thread is flaring on the SOAP list. There are valid points on all sides, naturally, but your typical mail list is like a conference room with dozens of participants. It doesn't matter how intelligent or knowledgable the participants are, if they don't understand how to properly focus and direct a discussion then chaos results.

The end result of this thread will be like a lot of others: nothing. By the time the thread ends there will have been very little coherent information that can be garnered from the thread that anyone could use to make any usable design choices or decisions.

Are there solutions? Yes.

Solutions range from simply maintaining a list of points and counterpoints all the way up to informal and formal facilitation and discussion techniques.

Will any solution be used? Most likely not.

Like most flamefests, immediately following the flamefest most participants will be worn out and unwilling to participate in a more structured discussion. In many cases, like this one, the people or organizations in charge may not see the need to discuss the topic further and won't spend the time or resources to flesh it out properly. Also, especially, the typical cause of a flamefest is that no one knows or uses structured discussion techniques anyway, so first you have to convince people to be more structured or be in the lucky position to have a charismatic facilitator.

In any case, chalk up another critical technical issue drowned out in a flamefest.