ietf
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: On the IETF Consensus process

2007-05-25 15:47:38
I hope the discussion is not theoretical and that some concrete changes come about as a result of discussions such as this (as much as I dislike the secret nature of them, I hope the IESG and IAB are having their own private debates on this topic and enact some of the changes soon: some of the confidentiality decisions are within their control at the moment, according to BCP 39).

Some of the aspects are as Jeff notes societal, but we are engineers, (scientists or whatever :) ) and we are expected to have some ethics in all of this.

Coming to the fear of retaliation issue (I guess we are talking about unethical behavior on part of an IESG or IAB member at this point), we need to find a way to fix that. On this, we seem to be worse off than the outside world. Let's take the US as an example (or we can take India too; I am sorry, but those are the only two countries I am somewhat familiar with): there are always checks and balances. The US president cannot start being a dictator after taking the oath (bad example, may be ;) , but let's not get into that). Yet, our own processes allow ADs to do exactly that (more specifically, someone who becomes an AD might try and see what all he or she can get away with and the push back is often too little or too late).

regards,
Lakshminath

On 5/25/2007 2:02 PM, John C Klensin wrote:

--On Thursday, 24 May, 2007 14:11 -0400 Jeffrey Hutzelman
<jhutz(_at_)cmu(_dot_)edu> wrote:

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.

There are also cases in which people fear retaliation of one
sort or another if they raise objections, especially when they
perceive that the IAB and/or IESG have already made up their
minds and were likely to treat further input as an irritation or
worse.  At one time, I thought these fears were groundless in at
least the overwhelming number of cases (and that the exceptions
involved serious bad apples on the IESG who probably would have
been recalled had that process been more effective).   However,
some observations in the last few years have led me to conclude
that things have shifted in the direction of that concern being
more legitimate, i.e., a person who exerts vigorous and
constructive objections to action on one issue may be at risk of
damaging his or her ability to get things done in the IETF in
the future.
If that concern is actually real, we are in trouble and
theoretical discussions about consensus processes are not going
to help us get out of it.

     john




_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>