Ted,
Thanks for a thoughtful note. I think you may well be on to an
explanation here. But there's something of a bitter irony about it.
On Thu, Nov 08, 2012 at 02:46:30PM -0500, Ted Hardie wrote:
process to restrict those unknown future incumbents. That's
interesting in part because we believe in precedent enough to worry
that ceding decision making will grant to later officer holders
equivalent power, but we don't believe in it enough to believe it will
guide what the later officer holders will do. That, again, likely
stems from a lack of trust.
[…]
evaluating change. If a proposed change furthers the mission of the
organization, we can likely manage the transition it implies, whatever
the scale might be. If it hinders the mission of the organization, it
shouldn't be taken on however cheaply and easily it might be done.
Both of these seem right to me, but the irony is that the fear of
unknown future incumbents is all by itself creating the warm, dark
place where we are growing the things that hinder the mission of the
organization. For one of the things that allowed the mission to get
done was the ability of the organization to look at strange, one-off
cases, decide that they were a one-off case, make a decision, and move
on.
The increasing weight of the processes simply don't allow that any
more, and it causes people outside the IETF to say things like, "I'm
not taking this work over there to be nibbled to death by ducks." The
recent process invocation in the unfortunate IAOC situation is not the
only example of this: WG formation is difficult and expensive. WGs
spend a great deal of time tip-toeing around delicate issues in an
effort to avoid making the appeal mechanism work. These are changes
too, even if they're just the result of gradual accretion, and they
are bad for the mission.
Best,
A
--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs(_at_)anvilwalrusden(_dot_)com