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Re: Appeal against IESG blocking DISCUSS on draft-klensin-rfc2821bis

2008-06-19 13:33:40
Ted Hardie wrote:
        There are very few cases where that is okay.  It applies when
there is a documented, larger community consensus that the WG or
submission group decision ignores (a working group decision that
congestion control wasn't important would get pushback on this
front, for example).  It applies when the Area Director can demonstrate
harm to the Internet as a result of the decision; the "can demonstrate"
there, though, is to the *community* not just to himself or the IESG.
It applies when the Area Director can demonstrate that the proposal
simply *does not work* to the satisfaction of the larger community, no
matter what the proposers believe.

Isn't the IESG is meant to serve two roles? The first is to be the arbiter of community consensus. The second is to be a judge on the quality of the work before them, as to whether it is ready to move forward. The threat of the IESG saying, "jeez what a {dumb|complex|...} approach" separates us from other standards organizations (or at least it did). The most famous example of all of this is still the ETHERNET-MIB WG where they were upset that Jon Postel reset a counter size in the final copy of the MIB to match the IEEE specification, and those folks were rip roaring upset that he did so. I don't want the IESG to author the docs like Jon did but I do want them to stand in the way of dumb ideas.

In this case they should be there to apply our *evolving* standards. To hogtie those folk to me just begs for others to attempt to make use of those knots to get their dumb standards.

Shouldn't the response to John's appeal demonstrate the balance between their two roles?

Eliot

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