Andrew,
On 2/3/2016 5:39 PM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
You seem to have elided the very part of my message where I said,
I assume folk have the original. Quoted text is for setting context to
the response.
Worse, the proposal seems to think that an IAB committee doing review is
somehow equivalent to one, continuing, deeply knowledge person actually
/participating/ in the IAOC's decision-making.
… one, continuing, deeply knowledgeable person. If it's important to
you to distinguish between "following" and "participating" here, I'm
happy to grant it. But none of that gets to the problem that is
really bothering me, which is …
The problem I cited was that the the need for a continuing participant,
with appropriate context from outside the IAOC and from within, is key
to the basis for the current ex-officio model. Any effort to change the
model needs to explain the ability to satisfy the functional goals of
the position.
Also, the current draft is attempting to change a defined position for
the IAOC/Trust but casts itself, instead, as making an IAB change. You
need to cast a proposal in terms of the IAOC and the IETF Trust, not in
terms of the IAB.
And to establish a linkage to a separate sub-thread: I think it would
be quite a good thing to start with a discussion of
deficiencies/limityations of IAOC and IETF Trust operations and views of
how to improve its operation. No, this needn't be comprehensive,
attempting to boil the IAOC/Trust ocean. The essence of the current
proposal is an concern about staffing the IAOC/Trust. That's a
perfectly reasonable point of focus, to narrow the discussion.
… this. I don't think it is healthy, for the IAB or for the
community, that we act as though the way to make this all work well is
to have some _one_ who has all the state. I think in the case of the
IAB we should distribute the state more widely.
Distribution of knowledge and responsibility. At the level of
granularity you and the draft have offered, the usual result for such an
approach is an operation with poor context and little accountability.
It makes up for this by also being slow and frustrating for everyone
involved.
I think it makes for
a more effective and useful body.
Please provide examples for an operations-related efforts like this that
demonstrate this result. (And to anticipate the possible retort that I
need to do the same for my assertion I'll offer that you folks are
proposing the change, so you folk need to substantiate its operational
superiority.)
It also is a practical effect of
taking seriously our usual claims that we work by consensus, that we
reject kings and presidents, and so on.
So, rather than having one level of diverse-participation committee
decision-making (the IAOC or the IETF Trust), you are proposing that we
have two levels, namely the existing one plus the IAB program. And you
think that will produce improved results. Why not just make all IETF
decision-making be consensus-based by the IETF itself? I offer that,
not a strawman, reductio ad absurdum extreme, but as the natural
conclusion to the justification you've just given.
• If the _ex officio_ people are expected to be participating as
enthusiastically as they are at present (I would like to think
that I'm holding up my end of the log in the IAOC and Trust, but
my colleagues there should feel free to correct me), then all we
get are more committee members.
You've forced things into two choices, when there actually are more.
The main problem is that we think there should be one
person in the middle of all these different things. It has struck me
more than once that if someone brought us a system with a giant single
state-exchange mechanism in the middle, many of us would immediately
say, "Won't scale, and too brittle and vulnerable." Yet we seem to
think it a good feature in the organization. I'm arguing that we can
try another way.
The error in that analysis is that the IAOC/Trust is (are?) already an
entity composed of a diverse sampling from the community that provides
representation. Adding another layer with more of the same doesn't
obviously provide benefit and does obviously add to complexity and delay.
Suggestion: A number of people have separately offered some very basic
concerns about the proposal. These concerns are not fixed with just
better writing of the draft. They call for re-thinking the issues and
re-casting a proposal in terms of those issues.
Again, I think that it would be consonant among those separately-offered
concerns to cast the proposal in terms of the IAOC/Trust, rather than in
terms of the IAB.
d/