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Re: No communication: #746 IAOC decision making

2005-01-12 20:42:05
Harald,

My personal, generic, preference is to put as little specific
text into the BCP as possible.  Broad principles, yes.  But
anything very specific, especially anything that is likely to
need tuning, should be in the BCP only if there are really
strong reasons why that is necessary.  So I'd be quite happy
with text directing the IAOC to establish voting rules and to
publish them or, better yet, to propose such rules for comment
to the IETF community and then establish and publish them (the
difference between the two is not a showstopper for me).

An extension of that point of view would argue that the present
(-03) text is excessive and could reasonably be further trimmed.
For example, I doubt that it is really necessary to walk through
the unanimity/ consensus-and-polls / voting/ ties model in this
much detail.  Perhaps it would be preferable to just say that
the IAOC may vote when necessary, with only the "voting members"
voting (see how silly that sounds) and the chair figuring out
how to make decisions in the event of deadlock, but that the
IAOC should have a strong preference for unanimity or strong
consensus over close votes (and then insert the conflict of
interest statement).   But, again, not a showstopper -- I think
we are close enough and that anything in this range would be ok
with me.

    john

--On Wednesday, 12 January, 2005 22:22 +0100 Harald Tveit
Alvestrand <harald(_at_)alvestrand(_dot_)no> wrote:

In the -03 version of the document, the following text occurs:

3.4  IAOC Decision Making

   The IAOC attempts to reach all decisions unanimously.  If
unanimity
   cannot be achieved, the IAOC chair may conduct informal
polls to
   determine the consensus of the group.  In cases where it is
   necessary, some decisions may be made by voting.  For the
purpose of
   judging consensus or voting, only the "voting members" (as
defined in
   Section 4) shall be counted.  If voting results in a tie,
then IAOC
   chair decides how to proceed with the decision process.

   IAOC decisions are taken by a majority of the
non-conflicted IAOC
   members who are available to vote, whether in person or via
other
   reasonable means determined to be suitable by the members
of the
   IAOC.  The IAOC decides further details about its
decision-making
   rules.  These rules will be made public.

   The IAOC shall establish and publish rules to handle
conflict of
   interest situations.

   All IAOC decisions shall be minuted, and IAOC minutes shall
be
   published regularly.

Scott Bradner raised the issue that he thought this section
should include quorum rules. This debate forked:

- Rob Austein and I argued strongly that the IAOC should set
those detailed rules, and that the BCP was not the right place
to put them; Brian Carpenter and Bert Wijnen spoke out in
support of that.

- Scott Bradner, John Klensin, Avri Doria, Brian Carpenter and
Spencer Dawkins made (good) suggestions on what the quorum
rules should be, including interesting topics like emergency
powers, appropriate technologies for voting, the interaction
between rules for conflict of interest and quorum rules and so
on - but apart from the comments from Brian early in the
discussion (not needed) and Scott's (which I interpreted as
saying it needed to be in the BCP), I did not see any explicit
statement in their comments on whether the quorum rules needed
to be in the BCP or not.

My personal opinion is that the debate has given compelling
evidence that quorum rules are NOT easy to get right, which
also leads me to believe that we will need to change them on a
shorter timescale than the expected rate of change of the BCP
- thus that they should NOT be in the BCP; the BCP should just
require that they are public. (a rule that says "two people in
a closet" is probably a short road to the recall process...)
But this process is not about my opinion, but the IETF's
opinion.

So - Scott, can you confirm that you think quorum rules should
be in the BCP? Rob, can you confirm that you think they should
not be?

Brian, John, Avri and Spencer: Can you state if you have an
opinion about whether or not the quorum rules should be in the
document or not?

Let's get this point settled before we dig into what the
quorum rules should be - if they don't go into the BCP, the
whole text of #746 gets passed as "advice from the IETF
community to the IAOC".

                     Harald






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