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Re: Options for IETF administrative restructuring

2004-08-26 12:27:46
Leslie and Harald,

I would like to make one suggestion about this process. For suggestions about substance, I will, of course, wait for the final -00 version of the draft. This note is deliberately being sent before I have done so because I don't want my remarks to be biased by how I feel about its specific content.

There was considerable confusion in San Diego, and earlier, induced by large numbers of sub-discussions, with different, sometimes designated, groups of people holding discussions and not having access to each other's comments. Harald responded to comments about this during the plenary by indicating that, once the draft was posted, everything would be public.

So I would like to suggest that any discussions within or among the IAB and IESG, or subsets of them, or between them and other groups, take place on mailing lists whose archives are public and/or which can be subscribed to (even if only on a read-only basis) by interested members of the community.

The key strategic decisions here (as distinct from the fine details) have to be made with the informed consent of the IETF community. To me, that implies that all of the options and their pros and cons have to be on the table: after the fact, there should not be even a suspicion that the choice was influenced by discussions of only a reduced set of options.

I note in particular that your first "next step" reads "Have a public discussion on the IETF list on the options presented in the draft". I think that is exactly correct iff the community is reasonably assured that _all_ of the plausible options have been identified, and fairly described, in the draft. I hope and trust that is the case, but any suspicions, engendered by private discussion, that some options have been excluded from discussion by excluding them from the draft, would be extremely harmful and should be avoided.

As you said, we need to take the time to get this right. We also need to be sure that the community emerges from the process confident that all of the options have been fairly considered in the process of selecting the right one.

thanks,
   john



--On Thursday, August 26, 2004 11:16 AM -0400 Leslie Daigle <leslie(_at_)thinkingcat(_dot_)com> wrote:

[This is a re-send of a message I sent last night; that
message is
...

Hello, IETF community.

Attached is the document we promised you in San Diego - a
report from
our consultant, Carl Malamud, which lays out a series of
options and
recommendations for moving forward with the IETF administrative
restructuring process, according to the recommendations laid
out in RFC3716 (the Advisory Committee report).  It has been
submitted to the Internet Drafts repository and should be >...


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