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Re: Clarification of my comment on giving up on process issues

2006-04-15 07:33:05
John C Klensin wrote:

generally, what those types of proposal need, independent
of the process-change model we use, is enough community
discussion to permit making a determination that people care
and that there is sufficient consensus to move forward.

FWIW, I read these drafts up to the point where you wrote
"NomCom".  Because that's "only" about the paying members I
didn't look further.  I'd agree that it's odd that some folks,
in the "recall" example IESG members, are excluded from an
otherwise simple procedure - but apparently it's never used,
so fixing the procedure might be pointless (?)

The broader community shows little signs of caring

When I read articles on lists like newtrk / pesci / techspec
where I'm not subscribed (see my other article about the list
management oddities wrt IMA and TOOLS), and all I've to say
is "excellent idea" (e.g. about the decruft experiment), then
I won't bother to subscribe only to post an "add me".

In one newtrk case (auto-demotion from PS to historic) I sent
my two cents as PM, and got a reply that this doesn't really
help, therefore I didn't try that approach again.

(i)   Do nothing, on the ground that, if enough people
      don't care, nothing is severely enough broken.

(ii)  Go ahead and made the change, partially on the
      theory that, if it turns out to be significantly worse,
      _that_ will bring the community out to comment.

(iii) Continue thrashing.  Thrashing differs from (i) in
      that (i) doesn't use up community cycles and raise the
      frustration level.  Thrashing does both.

Obviously (iii) isn't ideal, but for some newtrk proposals the
outcome (zero) is fine from my POV.  The "three steps" can make
sense (e.g. STD 66).  It's against human nature to get it right
in less steps.  Three is a minimum - seriously, who cares what
I might think about this point ?  It's irrelevant.  One radical
idea could be to weight proposals by RFCs published (you'd end
up with a kind of veto right then :-), but probably that's what
all folks do silently for themselves, so we need no RFC for it.

if we can't even move forward smoothly with 3933 experiments
where there seems to be some interest, may be better than
(ii).    But it is, IMO, a fairly sad state of affairs.

IMHO Sam's proposal was meant to help Randy and Harald (as the
list-moms of two affected lists), and the IESG with a certain
"situation" (RfC 3934 not good enough, 3683 too disruptive) -
as it turned out the IESG didn't need this and went with 3683.

The IESG is working like the Holy See, that's no new invention.
At least it's mostly transparent (thanks to the tracker).  The
experiment with public transcriptions was less useful, critical
topics were blanked out, the rest only reflected what's already
visible - thanks to the tracker and the minutes.

                           Bye, Frank



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