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RE: IASA irresponsibility? (was: Re: [IAB] [Trustees] LastCall for Comments: Proposed work-around to the Pre-5378 Problem)

2009-02-20 17:21:29
John, this is to respond to one of your points, below:

As far as the "where does it go" question, the answer may be
clear to you, but it apparently was not clear to the Trustee
Chair (and poster of the announcement) who, according to
comments on the XML2RFC list, apparently indicated that it
would be ok to put it at the end.  

For the record, I received a question on January 23rd about whether it might
be better to move all of the copyright and associated boilerplate text
required on Contributions from the first page, to the back of every
document.  The basis of the question was that the length of the legal
statements needed on documents was growing, and it might not all fit neatly
at the front.

I replied on the same day.  I thanked the sender for the question, and took
an action to discuss this with the Trustees.  Please note that I did not
post this on the XML2RFC list, so you may be the victim of "here-say" in
this case.  Many things have transpired since January 23rd.  One is that I
failed to explicitly close the loop with the person who asked me if the
legal text might be moved to back matter.

We have had four revisions to the "Legal Provisions" policy since the first
call for community comments was posted on January 6th.  Two versions of the
draft were posted before January 23rd, two more were posted afterwards, and
then the last (fifth) revision is the one that was approved on February
12th, and made Effective as of February 15th.  The guidance with respect to
where legal text in Contributions is to appear was consistent in all of
these drafts.  Legal text is to appear in the front matter of Contributions.


Regards,


Ed Juskevicius


-----Original Message-----
From: ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org 
[mailto:ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org] On Behalf Of John
C Klensin
Sent: February 20, 2009 4:07 PM
To: Ray Pelletier
Cc: Trustees; wgchairs(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org; ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org; 
iab(_at_)iab(_dot_)org; iesg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org;
rfc-editor(_at_)rfc-editor(_dot_)org
Subject: IASA irresponsibility? (was: Re: [IAB] [Trustees] LastCall for
Comments: Proposed work-around to the Pre-5378 Problem)

Ray,

The expectation in that January discussion was that the Trustees
and IAOC were going to be proactive about this and take
responsibility to make sure things got done.   I don't consider
your "notifying the volunteers" and asking for a schedule to be
consistent with that.   They are, after all, volunteers.  

Indeed, if the IASA were taking this seriously, I would have
expected that you would approach the various maintenance groups
and said "look, we know that text is going to need to go in, and
go into this place, we just aren't sure about the text yet,
obtained the source code and patching instructions, and then
arranged for either the Secretariat or someone on a short-term
contract to be on standby to get those changes made.

Perhaps I'm the only one in the community who feels that way,
but I'd be a little surprised.

As far as the "where does it go" question, the answer may be
clear to you, but it apparently was not clear to the Trustee
Chair (and poster of the announcement) who, according to
comments on the XML2RFC list, apparently indicated that it would
be ok to put it at the end.  

I hope that there is real testing going on to verify that the
none of the relevant servers and connections will fail when the
load hits.  That is "real testing", and additional
configurations if needed, not your sending out a note indicating
that people should be aware of the risk.

Please recall that the supposed purpose of the IASA and its
current organizational model was to protect the IAB, IESG, and
the community from having to deal with these sorts of
administrative problems, and even more to protect against
depending on mad scrambles by volunteers to get things done in
order to prevent administrative  meltdowns.   If this is an
example, I don't think that is working out very well but, again,
maybe I'm the only member of the community who feels that way.

     john


--On Friday, February 20, 2009 15:46 -0500 Ray Pelletier
<rpelletier(_at_)isoc(_dot_)org> wrote:


On Feb 20, 2009, at 3:20 PM, John C Klensin wrote:
... 
So the announcement was made and, despite those commitments,
the ducks obviously were not lined up, the tools were not
ready, and we still can't, in practice, post drafts that need
the workaround text.

So, the Trustees went through a process of community review of
the changes to the TLP
posted on 6 January that resulted in some good suggestions
that led to iterations and
posting of changes on 22 Jan, 5 Feb, 9 Feb and finally 12 Feb.
They even caught where
a change was unintentionally made.

On 11 Feb I notified the 5 volunteers maintaining the tools
and templates that the Trustees
were voting on what I expected to be the last set of changes;
advised them of the changes and asked if they
could have the changes completed in a few days, e.g, 14 Feb.
I asked for estimated delivery dates.
Not all were able to get the changes made.  And as I said
above I am uncertain as to the
final tools being completed, but anticipated next week.

 Even if we could cut and paste the text in, we
have no statements about where it goes or decisions/opinions
from Counsel as to whether it can be dropped into a random
place in the document or needs to be next to the front-matter
copyright statements.

Section 6b of the Policy says: The following text must be
included on the first page of each IETF Document,
so I am not sure what the controversy is about.



And, today, you respond, not to that January discussion or the
associated commitments, but to a note posted last Friday...
one that it took you a week to get around to responding to
when the commitments indicated that we've have answers
contemporary with the announcement of the new text.

It has taken from last Friday to the other day to ascertain
where the volunteers
stood in the process of updating those tools and templates.

Ray



For all of the reasons cited in the January discussion, this
has gone far enough.  Independent of promises about what
might get done next week, I want to know --and I think the
community is entitled to know -- who is accountable.


    john











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