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Re: Incumbent conflict of interest

2008-09-15 16:32:53
Dave 

I said "perceived" conflict of interest.

Off the top of my head I can think of at least a half dozen or so participants 
(hereinafter "ranters") that are so convinced of their own infallibility, that 
the only way they can rationalize being turned down for something (document 
submission, a change of a specific word in a specific paragraph, WG chair, etc) 
is that someone is out to get them.   Giving them more ammunition to make such 
claims (e.g. obviously X is out to get me because I'm running against him) 
seems to me to be somewhat of a bad idea.

Couple this with the dozen or so participants who have loudly and repeatedly 
stated their belief in the evilness of various ADs both with and without 
objective evidence and even I might start getting confused about whether the 
original ranter is ranting or is making a point I should consider.   If I'm a 
nomcom member who hasn't been paying attention to past rants (because they're 
on a WG mailing list for example), I might be tempted to impute fire where the 
smoke is.

I believe over the years our ADs have been pretty free of conflict of interest 
- but the perception of such conflict of interest has at times taken on a life 
of its own. 

Mike




At 03:11 PM 9/15/2008, Dave CROCKER wrote:
Mike,

Michael StJohns wrote:
This isn't only about AD power, it's about perception of conflict of
interest.  
...
This might be a specious argument, but there are enough conspiracy theorists
...


This entire line of thinking gets scarier and scarier.  If it has any validity 
as concern, then we already have a very deep problem.  Candidacy often is 
already known among some of the IETF community, including among incumbents and 
other candidates.  So the conflict of interest problem is already present... 
if your point is valid.

Having candidacies be more publicly declared might change the statistics, but 
it won't change the basic reality.

d/
-- 

 Dave Crocker
 Brandenburg InternetWorking
 bbiw.net


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