On Aug 14, 2011, at 5:09 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
A document reviewer should never be expected to pretend like he doesn't
have a problem with a document. To expect an AD to change his vote to
"abstain" is asking him to be dishonest and/or shirk responsibility.
iirc the IESG used to call this kind of abstention "holding
one's nose", but it can't be distinguished in the ballot from
an abstention "for cause" (conflict of interest). In theory,
you can find out which applies from the history in the tracker
or from the IESG minutes.
To be fair, the current procedures do allow for a "recuse" vote, which handles
the "conflict of interest" case.
The point is to avoid blocking a document that the WG has
consciously chosen to support, and that has no concrete,
actionable defects, just because one or two ADs simply dislike
it.
The problem with the current procedure is that sometimes a WG will be in denial
about the existence of concrete, actionable defects, and other IESG members may
not have the time to review the document thoroughly or be in a good position to
do so. Sometimes it's also the case that the WG is exercising poor judgment
even if there aren't concrete defects, and sometimes there's no good and simple
fix for the WG's output.
When this happens, it is often the case that the WG represents a narrow set of
interests and doesn't see (or want to see) how its work creates problems for
other legitimate interests. Though it does happen in other situations.
(Admittedly, some of these cases could be considered failures of management -
the WG should not have been allowed to make a significant investment into a
document without there being some cross-area checking and other sanity checking
involved. One hopes, of course, that such failures are rare. But the proper
remedy to a management failure is NOT to approve a seriously flawed document.)
If an IESG member finds a substantial defect with a document, I don't think
it's responsible for him to hold his nose. I don't think it's responsible to
expect him to label his vote "abstain". The responsible thing to do is to take
that defect report seriously, even when the WG disagrees with the IESG member's
opinion (as will often be the case when there's no simple fix for the
document/protocol, or when the simple fix conflicts with the WG's ambition for
the protocol).
The current IESG voting process presumes that the WG's opinion should trump
that of its reviewers in the IESG. This makes the whole review process a
sham, as IESG review is reduced to essentially a rubber stamp.
When I was on IESG, a single Discuss could block a document. I'm not saying
that was a good thing overall, but even under those circumstances a stubborn WG
would often get away with refusing to fix technical defects in its documents.
With the current procedure, it's hard to imagine what would convince such a WG
to fix things. The only remaining available remedy would seem to be an appeal
to IAB.
Keith
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf