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[spf-discuss] Re: SPF council: new elections or disolve?

2005-11-15 18:40:21
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I am sorry for not having taken part in any of the recent discussions.  
Here in Germany, national elections were surprisingly announced early a 
few months ago (elections would normally not have been due until 2006), 
and I have been involved in the election campaigns and the election 
aftermath, so I haven't found the time to completely catch up on the SPF 
mailing lists until now.

Mark Kramer wrote:
I am of the belief that it behooves sitting Council members not to lobby
too actively for a certain outcome in matter.

I have virtually nothing to gain from my position as a council member, so I 
am taking the liberty of stating my personal opinion on the following 
matter.  I am writing this as an individual participant in the SPF 
project, however, so the following shouldn't carry any special weight.

Wayne Schlitt wrote:
Ok, a year a go we, the SPF community, had a bunch of things we needed
to decide on in a more organized fashion.  We ended up holding an
election and creating an "SPF Council".

The Council decided, quite arbitrarily, that the terms should be for
one year, which would end at the end of the month.  That means we need
to either hold new elections ASAP, or decide to disolve the SPF
Council.

Right, although I wouldn't agree that the one year term was mostly 
arbitrary.  It was a rough projection of how long it would take the 
project to complete the most important and immediate tasks.

Personally, I think we should disolve the SPF Council.  There hasn't
been a meeting for months and that is because no one has offered any
agenda items that needed to be decided on.

(There should have been more regular meetings.  I as a council member have 
been lobbying for regular if very concise meetings for a long time.  I 
think it would have kept up the steam.)

I don't foresee enough decisions in the future that we need an SPF
Council to decide on. 

One of the reasons I strongly dislike bureaucracies is that they tend
to long outlive their original purpose and usually outlive any
purpose.

So, what do people want to see done?  Hold new elections?  Disolve the
Council?  Extend the Council members' terms?

I think there is still a lot to do for the project.  Quoting a few things 
from my platform[1] from the 2004-11 council election[2]:

 1. | Submit the final [SPFv1] spec to the IETF.

    I don't think this can be taken as finished until the SPF spec has an
    RFC number and the outstanding appeals have been resolved.

 2. | Develop and advocate SES, SRS, et al as equivalent alternative
    | solutions to the forwarding problem [...].

    Unfortunately, this is something that we haven't achieved.  As far as I
    can tell, the dissemination of SES/SRS code in OS and MTA distros is
    worse than that of SPF itself, and even the latter leaves a lot to be
    desired.  In any case, the project at least needs to develop an as-
    clear-as-possible vision of how to deal with the forwarding problem,
    even if we choose to follow the "forwarding is the receiver's business"
    mantra.

 3. | Make plans on what to do next. SPFv1.5? SPFv2? End-to-end crypto
    | such as S/MIME? Domain-based reputation systems (cf. SpamCop?)?

    This is actually the _most_ important task, IMO, that should be taken
    up by the SPF project.  Personally, I think the project should...
    * create a successor of SPFv1 (be it called SPFv1.5, SPFv2.1, or SPFv3)
      that builds upon the lessons that we have learned from SPFv1, and
      that embraces the other sender authentication methods like DKIM and
      thus actually lives up to the term "Sender Policy Framework"
      (yes, it may take a long time to get it adopted, but I think it would
      be worthwhile), and
    * build a domain-based reputation system -- in concept if not in
      implementation -- that finally allows SPF (and authenticated sender
      domains in general) to be used for fighting e-mail abuse.

The project assets (domains) issue in itself should not justify the ongoing 
maintenance of the council, but IMO, in addition to continued PR, at least 
items 1 and 3 would benefit greatly from a steering group.

So, personally, I think we should elect a new council.

As for the organization of council elections, I think they can be easily 
conducted using CIVS[3] (the system we used for voting on the domain 
names).  Using ranked (Condorcet) voting we can even combine the election 
with a referendum about whether a new council should be instituted at all: 
just add "The council body should be dissolved" as an option next to all 
the candidates.  Then, if in the overall results this option ranks higher 
than all of the candidates, a majority of voters wishes the council to be 
dissolved.

I also think that the council should decide on who should be allowed to 
vote, and that it should appoint a neutral election officer who oversees 
and conducts the election.

Julian,
an individual participant of the SPF project.

References:
 1. 
http://archives.listbox.com/spf-discuss(_at_)v2(_dot_)listbox(_dot_)com/200411/0582.html
 2. http://new.openspf.org/Council_Election/2004-11
 3. http://www5.cs.cornell.edu/~andru/civs
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