Keith, thank you for the feedback. Some responses inline:
1. Fix the broken IESG voting system before you try to establish more decision
criteria.
I do agree with your general thinking here. The way that you describe the
different positions is what I personally try to achieve in my IESG reviews.
But I think you are overemphasizing the role of the vote designations. Again, I
try to do this already, though maybe not always succeeding. In general, if the
Area Directors are not doing their job of stopping bad stuff and moving good
stuff along, they don't need a new voting system, they need to grow a spine.
Elaborating a bit more about this:
We have plenty of cases where a DISCUSS has been left standing, and today that acts as
your "NO" vote. (Obviously, in many cases this was an error, or lack of effort.
I'm quilty of this for sure, even right now I have a queue of DISCUSSes and their
proposed resolutions that I need to go check.) But I think a DISCUSS should stand, if
there is a serious issue and it is not rectified.
There are corner cases where a single AD has an opinion that is not shared by
the rest of the community. For those cases we have an override procedure. This
has been never been invoked, but that's probably because it gets pretty ugly
way before that -- there are often heated discussions between ADs about
discusses.
We have the ABSTAIN vote, which some ADs use to vote "NO", often together with
other ADs who feel the same. There's never been a case where this would have blocked a
document from proceeding, as we've never collected the necessary 1/3 number of ADs to
vote ABSTAIN for any single document. My conclusion is that ABSTAIN stands for
NO-OBJECTION in practical terms. I don't recommend its use...
2. Don't overconstrain the use of DISCUSS. In particular, don't ever create a
situation where a reviewer can't cite a problem with a document, regardless of
whether that problem has previously been enumerated.
I agree, and that's why the guidelines I posted are just that -- guidelines.
They are not binding rules, they leave room for a judgment call.
3. I take serious issue with the statement in the draft that IESG reviews are
"reviews of last resort" and the implication that WG reviews are sufficient.
In numerous situations this has not been the case.
Of course. But I don't see a conflict between a "review of last resort" and having the
last resort find issues. I wish we'd find less issues, but at least I still view the IESG as the
final check, that should catch issues if others have not. Its not a "last resort" in the
sense that it would not be invoked; we do review all documents very carefully. Its a last resort
only in the sense that there is an expectation that previous stages should have produced a quality
result without issues.
Jari
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