I agree that "spokesperson" is not either the appropriate term. And leader
is far far away to be representative of their roles and positions.
True that on their role they "lead" the organizations they are involved
with but the Internet community does not follow them as *leaders*,
particularly the CEOs of some organizations such as ICANN, ARIN, etc, that
are just paid employees to play a specific executive role.
I'm really starting to dislike this effort of reverting the bottom-up
process by a group that is starting to behave like a dictatorial junta
making public statements that can be considered or interpreted as
representative of the Internet community and particular organizations such
as IETF.
They are no spokesperson, nor leaders, just they are what they are the CEO
of ICANN, the Chair of IETF, the CEO of ARIN, etc.
My .02
Jorge
On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 6:20 AM, Ted Lemon
<ted(_dot_)lemon(_at_)nominum(_dot_)com> wrote:
Folks, as John Klensin said, the reason we do not say "spokesperson" is
that our leadership do not speak for us. We only speak as a group through
the consensus process. So the term "spokesperson" is simply inaccurate.
The term "leader" makes sense as a generic because there were a number of
organizations, with different leadership structures, some not involving the
same consensus process that exists in the IETF. So we couldn't for
example say "chair," because that term wouldn't apply to all the people who
signed the statement.
I realize that the term "leader" has its own set of connotations, but I
don't know of a better word to use. There is no word that we could use
that would convey to someone who is not already familiar with IETF process
what we mean. Representative is no good for the same reason spokesperson
is no good. Avatar doesn't really work either.
I think it's better to just accept that the language is imprecise, and
think carefully about what is that we might be objecting to, and whether
the objection _really_ makes sense in the context. I guess there's about
zero chance that this won't get discussed to death, and that's fine, but I
don't think there's a knob to turn here.