Brian E Carpenter wrote:
Martin Rex wrote:
My impression of todays IESG role, in particular taking their
balloting rules and their actual balloting results into account,
is more of a "confirming body" of work that happened elsewhere
(primarily in the IETF, typically in IETF WGs, but also individual or
interest groups submissions from elsewhere, though the latter mostly
for (re)publication as informational).
IMHO, the IESG is not (and maybe never was?) a committee where _each_
member reviews _all_ of the work, where _each_ forms his very own opionion,
and where all of them caste a VOTE at the end, so that the diversity
within that committee would be vitally beneficial (to anything).
I think you've misinterpreted the IESG procedures a bit. The definition
of a NO OBJECTION ballot in the IESG ranges from "I read it, and I have
no problem with it" to "I listened to the discussion, and I have no problem."
I don't think so.
When I had a phone call with Russ Housley in early 2010, one of the
things I said was that considering the amount of document that pass
through the IESG, I would assume that not every AD was reading every
document and that each AD might be reading only about 1/4 of them,
and he replied that this could be near the real numbers.
It's impossible to say objectively which of these extremes predominates,
but when I was General AD, I tried to at least speed-read every draft,
and studied the Gen-ART reviews carefully. Individual ADs vary in their
habits according to workload, but my sense is that there is a strong
sense of collective responsibility and definitely not a sense of
rubber stamping.
I do not think that the IESG is actively rubber stamping, and I
know of a few past events where the IESG actively resisted to such
attempts.
However, the ballot process is made to err towards publication
of a document. How often does the IESG *not* publish documents,
and why?
Considering the effort it took to convince IESG not to take an
action / publish a document (IIRC draft-ietf-v6ops-6to4-to-historic-04.txt)
then I'm much less convinced that having a ballot procedure that fails
towards action/publication is such a good idea.
-Martin