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Re: Should the IESG rule or not? and all that...

2005-07-01 13:25:17
        After Kobe, the IETF established the IESG and IAB as twin
        oversight bodies with some responsibility to look after
        the overall technical health of the Internet, especially
the important parts.

Bob,

As I recall, you were on the IAB that was deposed after the Kobe revolt. I use such a strong word because that really is what happened, and it took some years for the IAB to find its role as architectural staff experts for IETF work. (In the last couple of years, it has moved increasingly into line-management issues, thereby completely muddling its role as appeal court for challenged IESG decisions.)

I was on the IESG that inherited the responsibilities from the Kobe change. Your characterization of what happened is completely different from my experience of it.

Before Kobe, the IAB operated in a relatively parental manner, with periodic and unpredictable late-stage rejection of lengthy working group output. Not surprisingly, this engendered considerable and deep dissatisfaction among the IETF community. Kobe, therefore, was merely the final straw.

Prior to Kobe, the IESG operated as a toothless facilitator of process. Area Directors sought to offer advice to working groups and to keep the IAB happy. The job had an impressive degree of insecurity, given the worries of offending working groups or the IAB.

Kobe resulted in exactly one change in the daily operation of the IETF:

     Authority to approve working group documents
     was moved from the IAB to the IESG.

That is it! There was no other operational change. No grand philosophy. No re-specification of the nature of the work being done.

The only other change -- and it was a big one -- was creation of nomcom and the regular review and selection it provides.

Nothing like "responsibility to look after the overall technical health of the Internet" was assigned to the IESG.

However it certainly does appear that that is the role it has arrogated to 
itself.

Unfortunately, it is a frankly pretentious role to attempt:

a) the IESG does not do the work of creating specifications and it has demonstrated no power to create that work; initiatives and work come from the community; and

b) the IESG cannot enforce this supposed responsibility; the only people who can assert real "responsibility" for the technical health of the Internet are those that compose the Internet technical community in its entirety. With respect to IETF-related work, that is the entire IETF community, not a selected subset.

     What that selected subset CAN do is to raise issues with
     the community and assess community consensus about those
     issues.

These are not trivial tasks.

Knowing when to raise an issue requires quite a bit of expertise. So for example, the technical concerns from Larry Roberts' request come from significant expertise.

The problem is with believing that that expertise imparts authority to make an approval/rejection decision, rather than imparting the ability to prompt community review of the request.

As others keep pointing out, the IESG -- and for that matter the IETF -- has no power to prevent development, operations or use decisions. Those occur outside the IETF.

The IESG and the IETF has power only through its ability to pursuade. To recruit rough consensus.

Pursuasion is very different power and process than decison-making "authority".

--

  d/

 Dave Crocker
 Brandenburg InternetWorking
 +1.408.246.8253
 dcrocker  a t ...
 WE'VE MOVED to:  www.bbiw.net

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