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Re: Consensus? #843 section 3.5 - ISOC BoT and overturning decisions

2005-02-11 12:22:04

Hi Harald,

At 5:02 PM +0100 2/11/05, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
                       In no circumstances may the IAB or
  ISOC Board of Trustees overturn a decision of the IAOC that involves
  a binding contract or overturn a personnel-related action (such as
  hiring, firing, promotion, demotion, performance reviews, salary
  adjustments, etc.) as a result of an appeal.

So, if a person appeals a decision of the IAD or IAOC to the ISOC Board and, in the course of investigating that appeal, the ISOC Board determines that a contract or personnel decision violates ISOC's accounting policies, violates the laws of the country most likely to have jurisdiction and/or could result in substantial liability for ISOC (these are the types of exceptional situations that I could envision falling under this clause) could the ISOC Board overturn the decision? Or would the ISOC Board be constrained to providing "advice" to the IAOC because this issue was discovered as the result of an appeal?

I am not comfortable with the idea that the ISOC Board would be constrained to providing advice in this (extremely unlikely) situation, since the IAOC does not have responsibility to uphold ISOC policy, ensure that ISOC conducts its business in a legal manner and/or protect ISOC from liability -- the ISOC Board does.

My understanding of the justification for why the IAB should not be able to mess with contracts or personnel decisions is that the IAB is not chosen for business expertise and therefore might lack the expertise to fully understand the implications of changing those decisions. I certainly hope that isn't true of the ISOC Board (present company excepted, of course).

I'm also somewhat uncomfortable with the process that is resulting in these changes (the ones that I have suggested, as well as the ones that I don't like)... We seem to be changing the document quite frequently (faster than I feel I can keep up, sometimes multiple times between actual revisions), and many of these changes are being made based on the comments of one or two people. In some cases (not this one) we are making changes to text that has been stable in the document for months.

Are you sure that everyone who cares about this process is keeping up with these changes? Is there some plan for making sure that everyone is still in-sync on a final version? I think that an IETF LC is supposed to serve that purpose, but we seem to have already held ours...

Margaret


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