On Wed, 16 Nov 2005, Julian Mehnle wrote:
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),
Yes, I noticed such activities when I was in Berlin in August...
(some choice you made too - first woman leader in Germany in 1000 years)
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.
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.
Which BTW we still did not. RFC is not yet published, new website is
not ready, situation with SID & conflicts is not resolved (more on this
should have been issued). I would also argue that next thing (even more
important) is organizing work on next version of SPF.
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.)
Yes. With all due respect to Wayne, it appears the problem with less
regularity in SPF Council meetings started when Chuck departed - he
appeared to have been quite good ad organizing such council activities.
Now I purposely leaving entirely of what Julian said below, because
I pretty much agree with all that he said there too.
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.
That sounds good to me. Although I fear some similarities in such
combination to our recent "recall" election in California, which is
not something I liked.
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.
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