Re: 1601bis: The Charter of IAB

--On Saturday, 12 February, 2000 14:40 +0800 "Rahmat M. 
Samik-Ibrahim" <rms46(_at_)oke(_dot_)com> wrote:
> I also believe what Klensin wrote is still valid:
>
> ..............................................................
> ........
>
> [... 22 Feb 1996 ... skipping voting out of existence, fine
> lunches  and dinners, and irresolvable controversy
>   pronouncements...]
My, my, do I love being quoted out of context on a comment that 
was made four years ago, and was intended as humorous rather 
than a serious comment on the process.  I don't remember the 
comment or its context, but strongly suspect from the partial 
sentence excerpt that it was _never_ "valid" except as a 
sarcastic and/or cynical remark, made in passing and intended to 
mean the opposite.
Rahmat, this is one of the difficulties with the path you seem 
to want us to go down.  Except when formally hearing an appeal 
and, possibly in a very small number of other cases (I can't 
identify any at the moment, but don't want to get into a 
nit-picking argument with you about whether they exist), the IAB 
isn't a formal deliberative body.  And, even when we face those 
more formal situations, we are not, as we pointed out recently 
in another context,  a court of law and will not try to behave 
like one.  Instead, we operate very informally, as a collection 
of people trying to collectively understand issues and help the 
IETF move forward.   All of those people bring strong technical 
skills and experience to the table, rather than being 
professional or amateur lawyers or the like.  If you don't like 
the composition of the IAB in terms of the individual profiles 
and personalities, that is a Nomcom  issue, not a charter or 
procedural one.
In working informally --with each other and with the IETF 
participant community (especially those who are making technical 
contributions)-- we also tend to be human.  Under stress, some 
of us even become cynical or engage, informally, in what we call 
in the US "black humor".  So, as you must know, do several other 
professional population groups: this shouldn't be any surprise 
or cause for concern.  But that informal process is precisely 
what permits us to work as a team, in spite of different 
backgrounds and perspectives, and quite often come up with 
results that are clearer and better than any of us could have 
produced alone.  Tying us up in procedures, or requirements that 
we expose and document every word spoken or written, would, at a 
minimum, cripple our ability to get anything done.  That would, 
of cousre, prevent our doing harm by preventing our doing 
anything, but I, at least, don't see that as in the best 
interests of the IETF or the Internet generally.
I think those of us who have been following your notes over the 
last few years understand your concerns but generally do not 
agree.  As, I believe (haven't checked), the only member of the 
current or upcoming IAB with significant professional training 
in the social and behavioral sciences, I am probably more 
sympathetic than most to your desire for a clear historical 
record.  But --precisely because I continue to be interested in 
the interactions between process, formal procedures, and 
results-- I don't think it is productive in this case, 
especially to what, IMO, is the extreme to which you want to 
take things.  More specifically, I would personally prefer to 
avoid turning the IETF, or any of the related or subsidiary 
structures, into an experiment in political theory or utopianism 
(mine or anyone else's).
With regard to your substantive comments about appeals and jury 
processes... The reality is that all of the appeals that have 
reached the IAB within my memory have involved significant and 
often complex technical components, typically including 
questions of whether WG, WG Chair, or IESG decisions on a 
particular issue were reasonable in the light of some technical 
argument.   They haven't been exclusively procedural, or 
exclusively technical, but a inseparable mix of the two.    In 
the "outside world", the historical experience with 
randomly-chosen juries in that type of situation has been fairly 
terrible.  That is not surprising: if one doesn't understand the 
issues but is forced to make a decision, one decides on some 
other basis.  It is also well-known that, if the randomly-chosen 
members of the jury can be educated about the issues, then 
results get better: but that is a time-consuming process and can 
easily lead to claims about the biases of the educators who 
must, recursively, be selected and/or monitored by some process 
that reduces or eliminates those concerns.
Now, if we were dealing with exclusively procedural appeals, I 
would agree with you that an independently-selected appeals 
body, one that could deal with conflicting claims about what had 
occurred on an adversarial and evidentary basis, would be a 
better and more convenient idea.  I actually suggested that a 
few years ago, possibly in the document from which you extracted 
the above, because I assumed we would see mostly that type of 
appeal.  But, if I recall, the community rather throughly 
rejected that idea.  And, in retrospect, I'd assume that at 
least part of the reason was that I was wrong: while there would 
still be some attraction to getting appeal work off the IAB's 
agenda (my other motivation at the time), we haven't seen those 
types of appeals.
I could quibble with some of your other suggestions (e.g., 
picking people conditioned on attendance would result in an 
uncomfortably biased (in the statistical sense) group, 
especially if an appeal addressed the way in which a 
mailing-list-only participant was being treated.  But it isn't 
worth it: the general idea itself is fatally flawed by an 
incorrect assumption about the nature of the appeals that arise.
Conversely, blue-ribbon appeals panels for more technical issue 
have some logical appeal, but would, I believe, create a 
different sort of bias, one that involves very slow procedures 
and responses.  And a non-trivial fraction of IETF participants 
seem to have a deep suspicion that people who _really_ want to 
serve on such things should be disqualified as 
non-representative of the community, if not outright insane, 
which is probably not a good basis for trust in such panels.
The system isn't perfect, but options such as the ones you 
suggest were considered and the conclusion was that, on balance, 
the present setup isn't significantly worse than other possible 
choices and better than many of them.  And I think actual 
experience so far, as distinct from theorizing about 
possibilties for what might happen or about ideal processes, has 
largely confirmed the acceptability of those choices.
    john

p.s. The above remarks have not been examined to be sure that no 
word could possibly be misinterpreted by someone inclined to do 
so.  So now I guess I get to spend the next year or four 
worrying about which phrases will be taken out of context and 
used ot demonstrate something I don't believe (either now or "by 
then")  :-(