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Question about draft-housley-iesg-rfc3932bis-12 (was: I-D ACTION:draft-housley-iesg-rfc3932bis-10.txt)

2009-11-17 17:15:46
Dear colleagues,

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 04:47:44PM -0500, John C Klensin wrote:

I wish that that IESG (or some few of its members; I don't know)
were not insisting on even that much, but there seem to be
nothing that can be done about it without the loss of much more
time (remember that Independent Submission publications have
been blocked for many months by the side-effects of this
situation).

All of the to-ing and fro-ing about this document has finally made me
sit up and read it.  I have the impression from the archives that at
least some people are concerned about the dispute resolution
mechanism; there seems to be a suggestion about that it impinges on
the traditional freedoms of the RFC Editor.

I haven't made up my mind about that, but I am curious why the section
is being included anyway.  The first two sentences of Section 4 all
but say that this is a problem that has never happened.  The only
motivation the document supplies is that there could be a dispute, and
that it'd be nice to have a way of solving the dispute if it were
needed.  There's no mechanism at all in RFC 3932, as I read it.

My experience of this sort of formalism leads me to believe that, when
there is no formal mechanism, everyone is forced to act in good faith
to hammer out a compromise; whereas once there's a well-established
set of rules in place to handle disagreements, there's very little
incentive to avoid cranking up that machinery for even very small
disputes.  (Social pressure doesn't work, because the retort is always
that this is what the mechanism is for.)

So I'd find it really useful to know what problem this dispute
resolution mechanism is actually supposed to solve.  I also wonder
whether those in favour of the mechanism have worked through the
potential workload that would result from high-frequency application
of this mechanism, and whether IESG or IAB (or both) members have the
time to invest in such an eventuality.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs(_at_)shinkuro(_dot_)com
Shinkuro, Inc.
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