Wow! Guys we are in a global pandemic! Common sense says take the least amount of risk possible for everyone concerned. Things are now worse globally, so why meet in person and spread the disease even further?
On Sat, Sep 4, 2021 at 08:50 John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Spencer,
Your characterization of my comments is correct. The thing you
left out is that most existing such insurance politics contain,
often in fine print, provisions that the insured party is not
allowed to be egregiously stupid and/or to ignore clear legal or
equivalent advice.
To extend your example into the ridiculous, suppose that, in
addition to declaring consensus, you told the proponents of the
losing proposal to go jump in the lake, a lake that you knew was
infested by deadly and fles-eating bacteria, viruses, or
animals. Suppose they followed your advice and their heirs or
companies then sued. Whether the insurance company would pay up
or defend you would probably depend on the company and the
policy but, if they did, they would almost certainly try to
recover costs (at least) from you and/or whomever was
responsible for putting you in that position. And then the
various lawyers would get rich trying to settle the issue of
whether you were the stupid and irresponsible one for making
such a suggestion or whether the parties who ended up in the
lake were responsible because treating your advice as anything
but metaphor were the stupid ones.
See Jay's note and, again, changing the organizational location
of the IETF would not change things very much because the issues
from the standpoint of the insurers don't change much even if
explicit government policies do.
best,
john
--On Saturday, September 4, 2021 10:20 -0500 Spencer Dawkins at
IETF <spencerdawkins.ietf@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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,
>
> there was an insurance policy that covered me making 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
