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Re: A sort of council of elders for the internet

2013-11-11 10:12:15
On 11/10/2013 1:35 PM, Ted Lemon wrote:
On Nov 10, 2013, at 3:41 PM, Dave Crocker <dhc(_at_)dcrocker(_dot_)net> wrote:
Without changing the /authority/ of the AD to make appointments,
what about having the AD circulate a list of candidates to the
pre-wg mailing list and solicit comments.

I absolutely love this idea, and I think it would be a disaster.
There's a reason why nomcom comments are not made public.   And as an
AD, I can tell you that there are situations I can imagine (which
haven't yet come up) where I would absolutely _not_ want to follow
the preference of the community.   You could argue that such a
situation is dysfunctional and the working group ought not to be
formed, and you might be right, but I think you need to iterate on
this idea a few times before we get to where it's something that
could actually be done... :)


That last sentence (, but...) is key.

I put forward a basic idea. Most of the critical responses have rejected the idea outright. I didn't intend my suggestion as fully-formed, but as an idea needing discussion, to work through the details of making it viable within the IETF culture.

For example, contrary to at least one response, I never suggested that there be public discussion of the candidates.

Most of the negative comments have re-iterated concerns that were lodged for many years about making nomcom-related nominations public, delaying the adoption of this utterly reasonable change for at least 10 years and hurting the nomcom process as a result.

As far as I am aware -- including two recent rounds of participating in nomcom - none of the fears have been realized. Rather, I believe the greater transparency has been extremely helpful to the nomcom process.

Most of the negative comments also tend to ignore problems with the current model. I'll suggest that these these involve tradeoffs and that concerns need to be balanced against benefits. The concerns also need to pay attention to IETF realities rather than unanchored fears. So, for example, there have been almost no cases of politicking, since nomcom nominations became public.

The current methodology for choosing wg chairs is not without problems. That's what triggered my making the suggestion.

Those problems will not get resolved magically.

d/


--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net