On Wednesday, May 23, 2007 06:56:10 PM -0700 Lakshminath Dondeti
<ldondeti(_at_)qualcomm(_dot_)com> wrote:
Hi Jeff,
On a first scan of your email I thought to myself, I agree with most of
it and so pondered about the problem that I was trying to put forth in
front of the community. The conclusion was that indeed if everyone
follows the rules and if the checks and balances work as they are
supposed to, perhaps there are no problems. Unfortunately though, our
system of checks and balances is that people need to object, as you put
it; often people at the losing end of an argument may object and thus may
be dismissed.
This is a difficult problem. I'm sure there are many cases where people
should speak up and don't. There are also a number of cases where someone
who has legitimately lost refuses to accept that. Unfortunately, the
latter are usually much more easily observed. If we could find a way to
drastically cut down on either category without growing the other, we'd be
able to make substantial improvements, both to the IETF and, if the
solution scales, to society as a whole. Unfortunately, it's a hard problem.
Consider what happens if a WG chair or an AD's decisions are skewed,
either intentionally or because they are naturally biased towards a
particular philosophy? Often people tend to try and live with it or
adjust to it. There is not really a viable avenue to provide feedback
about the AD. Appealing (happens rarely) or recalling (never happened?)
are drastic measures.
Yes, they are, and no, the recall procedure has never been used. I'm sort
of torn on this - most every decision is appealable, and if an AD is making
bad decisions and won't listen to reason, they should be appealed.
However, if everyone appealed every decision they didn't like, we'd never
get anything done.
Next, I agree that all the decisions are public, but I will note that not
many people have the bandwidth to know what all is going on (there are
ADs who don't monitor WG mailing lists on a regular basis). There is
also the tendency to be silent hoping that other people will raise the
issue.
True.
For instance, I had started thinking more clearly about BoF processes and
how a small set of people can derail a BoF process after I started this
thread. A few vocal people at the mic and secret reports from IAB
members (conflicts of interest seem to go unnoticed) can undo months
worth of work and the proponents have to wait 4 more months to do
anything. There is no reason it needs to be that way.
Sorry; I really want to answer this part, but I'm out of time for now.
Perhaps I'll come back to it next week.
-- Jeff
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