I'm current with the downthread discussion as of me typing this, but I'm backing up to John's email, because it mentioned an important point, that I happen to know a little, but only a little, about, and my experience has been that much of the community isn't aware of (and people don't even know that they're not aware of it, because the topic doesn't come up in discussions very often).
John, please feel free to correct me if I'm misrepresenting what you said here.
On Thu, Sep 2, 2021 at 2:02 AM John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote:
IANAL, but I have spent some time dealing with insurance
companies, including special risk underwriters, and trying to
understand the statistical risk assessments on which willingness
to insure and rates are ultimately based. While neither RFC 8717
nor 8718 appear to mention insurance among the criteria, I
suppose it is safe to assume that, were an insurer come to the
IETF and say, e.g., "if one of your meetings turns into a
superspreader event, there will be no coverage for either the
LLC or individual IESG or LLC Board members being sued over the
irresponsible decision", there would be no f2f meeting.
When I went through WG chair training in the late 1990s for the first time, I was told (in a different world, of course - Steve Coya and Jeff Schiller were doing the training, IIRC) that ISOC provided insurance for (at least, not sure who else) WG chairs, in case they were sued because of decisions they made as part of their responsibilities.
So,
- if my working group considered two individual-draft proposals, and
- one was adopted and the other was not, and
- the proponents of the proposal that was NOT adopted sued me as the working group chair that made that decision and/or declared consensus on that decision,
(I'm not sure if this is even true these days, because I haven't wondered about insurance in nearly two decades, but stay with me here).
If there's a similar situation in place these days, and it covers (for instance) IESG members and LLC members who would be involved in making venue decisions as part of their responsibilities, I can EASILY imagine an insurance company saying "ya know, defending people who might send hundreds of people into harm's way because of a careless decision they make during the Age of Plague either isn't something we want to do, or we need to talk about how much we'll charge to defend them for making those decisions, and the price isn't going down".
I THINK that's what John is saying here, and because there are people on this list who likely are more current than I am, I won't try to do more than provide background from my past understanding.
But, please, continue.
Best,
Spencer
