| I think the majority of the proposed policy is taking the wrong approach. Much of what I want to say has already said, but maybe there’s something left to add. No organization that represents the IETF should have a policy that discourages people from fully participating in all aspects of the IETF standards process, except in very narrow situations. That is, any such policy should focus on real CoI, not imagined CoI. I’m going to focus on the RPC, but I think the same logic applies to some degree for all LLC staff and contractors. The board might be different, but I have not thought that through. In the case of the RPC, I have a great deal of difficulty imagining how an RPC member would have a vested interest on a technical matter due to fact of their presence on the RPC. It seems less likely than for employees of network equipment vendors. In fact, they might represent the idealized IETF participant, that is one who only represents their best technical judgement. If we were developing technical publication workflow standards, I could see CoI, but no more than for an employee of a router vendor contributing to routing protocol work. It seems odd to me that the policy would allow more contribution to administrative work than technical work, since there is actually more likely to be CoI for administrative work. IMO, any LLC participation policy should be primarily about transparency and declaration of CoI, not about limiting participation in general. Maybe people need to recuse from certain specific things due to certain specific conflicts, but that is very different than blanket participation rules. Any such policy should err on the side of encouraging participation, not discouraging it. Thanks, Ben.
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