On 22 Dec 2022, at 13:49, Martin Duke wrote:
Re: The working group description. Sorry, I screwed this up and
totally
forgot that the message would go out to ietf-announce.
Thanks for saying so. We've all made these sorts of errors, but it's
great when leadership owns them and works to fix them in the future.
Re: AD/Co-AD. I'm trying to charter a WG because I think we need one.
My
role is to write a charter and gather consensus on it. I will not
chair the
WG or write any documents for it. I guess I "didn't try hard enough"
to
find someone to fine-tune the charter (I suppose people were reluctant
to
hold the pen for a document I had written), but I *did* try.
I think it's definitely part of our culture that ADs help champion new
work in their area. However, ADs have a bunch of responsibilities,
individually and collectively, including reviewing/approving BOFs,
charters, and eventual WG documents, chair selection/replacement,
hearing appeals, etc. (see RFC 3710). By being directly involved in
charter writing (and a bunch of other duties), you are effectively
conflicting yourself out of a bunch of duties you on which may need to
later recuse yourself, which means that your colleagues have to do more
work than they should. We talk an awful lot about how overworked ADs
are; not delegating championing a WG and writing a charter doesn't seem
like the best plan.
Also, if you are qualified to be writing a particular charter, it
probably means that you are the one on the IESG with the most technical
expertise on the topic and are more appropriate to be the one reviewing
the charter and managing the WG rather than your co-AD. Again, it seems
like if there is enough community support (and ability) to do this work,
you should be able to delegate the charter writing to someone else
(maybe an eventual chair or other senior member of the community).
Starting off by putting yourself at the center of the work seems like a
bad idea.
Does that mean that an AD should never be involved in writing a charter
for a new WG? Of course not. (Even though he doesn't believe me, I
learned much from Stephen Farrell during our time on the IESG together,
including that absolute procedural rules are silly in the IETF; you need
flexibility.) But it should definitely be the exception, because (a) it
makes doing your actual AD duties much harder (see above) and (b) it
doesn't do the kind of leadership development in the organization that
we desperately need to do.
And to never let agreement with John pass by without some disagreement
;-)
On Thu, Dec 22, 2022 at 10:55 AM John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx>
wrote:
Every
time we pick, as a WG or mailing list name, some cute acronym
that looks like a name that has an external meaning and that has
nothing obvious to do with the topic, those inclined to make
such claims have something else to point to when they claim that
we act like a bunch of immature children whose processes and
conclusion simply cannot be trusted to represent any real
consensus.
While I understand that is a risk, and needs some effort to reply by
saying, "Yes, such things are silly, but unlike other standardization
efforts, the IETF usually gets useful stuff done", I don't think this is
something worth changing. It's part of our culture and has been for a
long time, and even has good payoff some of the time. (Cf. the positive
government and press reaction that "SHAKEN/STIR" has had, and those are
some of the silliest and cutest acronyms we come up with.) And it is
surely the case in the US (perhaps to the chagrin of some) that the
legislature is extremely fond of creating silly and cute acronyms for
their legislative proposals (sometimes annoyingly so), so I have a hard
time believing that a similar habit among this bunch of engineers is
horribly damaging of our credibility. YMMD.
pr
--
Pete Resnick https://www.episteme.net/
All connections to the world are tenuous at best
