This isn't going to work, with ordinary members.
But Ts'o makes good points. You can't know easily who is trustworthy. Though
you can know sometimes who is not trustworthy.
I've seen a number of people in the leadership act inappropriately. Offlist, Ted
Ts'o, in his official role as Sargeant at Arms, was recently professionally
dishonest by falsely attributing statements to me that I didn't make. Ts'o was
summarizing the arguments I raised. Since Ts'o went to MIT, and since (if I
recall correctly) we dated the same girl at different times, I'm not sure if I'm
more comfortable thinking this is personally motivated rather than some sort of
incompetence at the task of literature summary. But fortunately, freshman must
now demonstrate skill at literature summary.
But Ts'o also asserted false facts[*] to the IETF Chair that are easily
checked.
He did this repeatedly, after being repeatedly informed that his fact claim was
false. The IETF Chair was informed, but took no action on these serious ethical
lapses.
One needs to hire lawyers to do this sort of thing. Lawyers are trained to find
facts, and to approach arguments dispassionately. Further, failing an acceptable
resolution, such disputes may wind up in litigation, so finding a fair and
honest solution is definitely going to be worth it.
[* Ts'o asserted that Alan Brown lost only one court case. In fact, Brown lost
three: One case (Domainz) was defamatory statements on an email list. Two others
(Xtra and Actrix) involved false claims of ISPs having open relays.]
On Wed, 28 Sep 2005, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
On Tue, Sep 27, 2005 at 06:47:36PM -0700, Nick Staff wrote:
2. An IETF "netiquette" committee, to offload list banning
procedures from the IESG.
I'm a big fan of the netiquette committee. I'd like to suggest that
volunteers be allowed to "throw their names into the hat" and that members
be selected blindly from that pool. This would of course avoid any stacking
or favoritism, but we would need a "qualifier" that prevented interlopers
from submitting their name. Though I hate to suggest it as it would exclude
me from selection, having attended an IETF meeting in the last x years could
possibly be a good filter.
Maybe. I see two potential problems:
1) Serving on this committee is going to be no fun at all. Getting
qualified people to sign up for what will only be seen as a sh*t job
is going to be difficult. And how do you exclude certain known
(repeat) troublemakers from throwing their hat into the ring? Or
maybe you don't, but then if they get selected, they would then have
the opportunity to practice their own unique form of DOS on the
netiquette committee?
2) Unless discussion of the decisions of the netiquette committee,
during the committee is considering a request, and after the committee
has rendered a decision, is ruled out of scope, it's not going to help
the very long discussions such as this one which plague the IETF list.
In the worst case, we can assume that the mailing list abuser will
immediately appeal any decision of the netiquette committee, which
means that after inventing this entire mechanism, it may not have any
effect other than prolonging the agony.
Problem (2) could be solved by making the decisions of the netiquette
committee not subject to appeal, but that causes its own problems and
potential for abuse of the people who do end up on the committee. But
if you don't, then people who are intent on practicing their DOS
attacks (or otherwise impose their view of their world on us) will
simply use our procedures against us.
I suppose we could try to add some sanctions such as using a very
large ban time (measured in multiple years), so the benefit of trying
to get someone banned from the list is worth the cost, assuming we are
willing to preserve through the entire tortious process of (a) a
decision by the netiquette committe, (b) an appeal to the IESG, (c) an
appeal to the IAB, and eventually (d) an appeal to the Internet
Society --- or perhaps we could impose an automatic doubling of the
sanctions if someone attempts an appeal, and double the eventual ban
time at each level of appeal if the banning is eventually upheld.
But there isn't really a good solution to this problem, unfortunately.
- Ted
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