Brian E Carpenter wrote:
On 2007-01-15 17:11, Michael Thomas wrote:
Michael Thomas, Cisco Systems
On Mon, 15 Jan 2007, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
Why not simply:
- copy all Comments and Discusses to the WG mailing list
- hold all discussions on the WG mailing list until resolution
Why would we do this for technical typos and other things that
are essentially trivial? I'd expect an AD to enter WG discussion
when raising fundamental issues, but not for straightforward
points.
This seems sort of like a red herring to me: typo posts
typically don't elicit much wg discussion in my experience.
But please help me here: it seems that DISCUSS as currently
instantiated is a conversation between the authors/wg chairs
acting as liasons with the IESG. This sets up sort of a
representative democracy kind of situation vs. a direct
democracy that would be a conversation directly on the wg list.
I can understand the IESG's desire for filtering, but that does
place a lot of power in the hands of the wg's representatives.
And power always begats abuse at some point... is this really
what was intended?
Abuse wasn't intended, obviously, but delegation was.
Put simply, ~200 WG Chairs scale better than ~16 ADs.
This rather assumes that the chairs and/or authors are always able
to remember not only the material that is currently before the IESG, but
also the history of how it got there. As an author, it's hard enough to
keep track of the former and the latter is back in the realm of the
super-human
again. So when you get a DISCUSS which may well involve the intricacies
of a very long and hard slog in the working group where many competing
parties finally agreed to a consensus... how as the representatives do
you know
whether you are telegraphing the will of the working group? It's very hard,
and at a late date it is *very* easy to make very basic mistakes again which
not only negate the consensus of the working group, but are potentially
just plain wrong. And that's assuming that there are no agendas, hidden or
otherwise.
So all in all, for an otherwise rather direct democratic kind of
institution, I
find the implied(?) representative nature of the backend linkages, non-
transparency of process, and the juxtaposition of a
fresh-but-disinterested
ruling body next to the inured-but-interested working group sets the stage
for a lot of potential process problems/abuses/surrender-and-ship-it kind of
outcomes. That doesn't seem right.
Mike
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