Fred,
On #2, when an AD posts a DISCUSS, s/he is now required to post a comment
... what you want is an automated note sent to the WG
sounds dandy.
On your third comment, which you didn't number, there has been a mechanism
for resolving a pocket veto since about 1997 or 1998, ... To deal
with the latter case, the IESG adopted a procedure in which a restricted
set of answers were acceptable: "YES" or "NO", no "DISCUSS", "ABSTAIN", or
"NO OBJECTION". If two ADs voted "NO", the document was returned to the
working group, and otherwise the "DISCUSS" was overridden.
thanks for clarifying this. is it documented somewhere public? i wandered
around the ietf.org site but didn't trip across it.
I have been looking at the following paragraph for a little while and
rewording around one of our odd distinctions. Sometimes documents come to
the IESG from a working group, and sometimes they come as individual
submissions placed by one or more authors. What I want is the largest
relevant inclusion - if a document comes from a working group, the
comments should go to the working group, and if it comes as an individual
submission it should go to all of the authors.
I'll see your largeness and raise you one: all documents subject to iesg
review should have a cited venue for open public discussion. Given that such
documents get an IETF-wide Last Call, it seems reasonable to direct folks
somewhere other than the ietf mailing list. And that's were the AD comments
should go, too, I think.
But let me define a term: to me, for the purposes of
discussion, a "working group" is ...
ok.
I think we need to give the ADs a little credit here. Your use of the
terms "intractable" and "veto" make them sound pretty awful.
FWIW I fully understand that and have chosen them intentionally.
I am trying to discuss a situation constrained by a narrow set of conditions
and, yes, the situation is indeed awful. It is also a real and periodic part
of the IETF landscape -- and it has been going back to pre-Kobe. In fact, it
is related to what I believe was at the core of the chronic discontent that
led to the Kobe revolt.
And that's why I see the issue as fundamentally structural, rather than
personal. It happens too regularly, across too many different personalities
-- most of whom have otherwise excellent track records -- to believe that this
is just a matter of a random AD going astray.
We are talking about conditions that we all hope are at the boundary.
Unfortunately there seems to be pretty solid community consensus that it does
occur. So, I am focusing on the case of an AD being the problem. There are,
of course, cases where working groups are the problem -- which is, after all,
why we need to retain meaningful late-stage review and, yes, refusal. But that
is not my focus at the moment.
In this AD-at-the-boundary condition, the perception from the outside is that
the AD is being intractable. It does not matter that the AD is certain to
think they are trying to do good things. What matters is that valid attempts
to resolve matters do not make progress and that there is strong indication
that the problem is the AD and not the working group. In these cases, the
effect of that AD's "discuss" is really a pure veto.
In fact, when
an AD feels that strongly about something, there is usually at least some
merit to the position. What I would really prefer to see happen when
things come to a head like that - which isn't all that often - is for the
document to be returned to the WG, the AD to talk with the WG (in email or
in person) about the issues, and work with the WG to come to closure on
the issues.
That's not when things come to a head. We used to have a problem getting the
objecting AD to talk with the working group but my sense is that that is not a
problem anymore. So, I consider public followup with the working group, by
the AD, to a natural and obligatory step immediately after the Discuss and,
from what I can tell, it happens regularly. So, that's not the problem.
The problem is after that, when there are legitimate efforts by the working
group to understand and resolve matters. However they are not able to for any
of the usual array of reasons that legitimately permit characterizing the AD
as being intractable.
This is what the override procedure you have described appears to be designed
to deal with. So it's good to hear about it.
d/
---
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
+1.408.246.8253
dcrocker a t ...
WE'VE MOVED to: www.bbiw.net
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