--On Sunday, July 16, 2023 19:19 -0400 Joel Halpern <jmh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > If I understand your email, your question at the end is about > my opinion on the matters we are wandering around. My main > concern is that we follow the rules we have on WG Interims, > rough consensus of WGs, and other procedural matters. While > I have opinions about when and how often itnerims are useful, > that clearly varies by cases and working groups, so I see no > point in pushing a general opinion. Let me expand on Joel's comment a bit and try to get back to my original note and question. I don't think abolishing interim meetings would be a good idea. I think on can argue that almost any mechanism of communications and decision-making we use or can devise is going to put some current or potential participants at an advantage relative to others (even though "disenfranchise" might be too strong a term in some cases). Even email is a problem for those who dislike reading messages more than a few hundred characters long and our insistence on English impedes the participation of those who whom communicating using it requires significant effort. However, if we are going to function as a community and to have statements in RFCs like "This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community." be meaningful, we need to have general community consensus about when various mechanisms (typically expressed as "rules") are appropriate, those rules need to be sufficiently clear that individuals and groups acting in good faith will all interpret them the same way (and hence follow them), and that they be applied in a sufficiently consistent way across WGs to make "consensus of the IETF community" (as distinct from "consensus of active participants in a particular WG") meaningful. None of that implies that the rules need to be over-rigid or over-constraining. At least IMO, the IETF has been at its best with we focus on Doing the Right Thing rather than on seeing how many rigid procedural rules (or even guideline statements) we can make... and that both because special circumstances that we could not anticipate often arise and because (at least historically) we are far better at designing Internet protocols than we are at specifying procedural rules that spell out every possible case and how it should be handled. My concern is that we are failing on the clarity part, making it difficult to determine whether the rules are being followed or not and leading to different interpretations in different groups. For example, if one looks at the first bullet of guidelines for online interim meetings in the most recent IESG Statement on the subject [1], we see: "The meetings are scheduled by the working group chairs, who should discuss their plans with the responsible area director well ahead of time." Now, does that mean, for example "a discussion with the AD is desirable but is not a requirement if it is inconvenient or if the WG chairs believe the AD might push back" or "a discussion is required unless there is a good reason, perhaps one that should be documented"? Are the criteria for "discuss" such that there actually needs to be a discussion or is it sufficient to send a note to the AD mentioning the plan and then take silence or a delayed response as approval? And, if some aspect of the meeting appears to violates provisions of RFC 2418 -- provisions that an IESG Statement about guidelines can presumably not override -- does that change that answers? Without a clarification of the guidelines that answer to those questions and others about other bullet points (some of which seem to me to concentrate on the WG where RFC 2418 and notions of IETF consensus require that attention be paid to the whole community), I don't see how we can even tell whether the rules are being followed, much less whether they are being interpreted and applied consistently across WGs and Areas. While I am concerned about deliberate efforts to subvert the rules and their intent, including the possibility of deliberately organizing or announcing meetings to exclude certain opinions, abuse of responsibility for moderating mailing lists to the same end, collusion between WG chairs and ADs, I think they are just a distraction until the community is clear about what it wants, we are confident that guidelines and BCPs are consistent with that clear understanding, and, preferably, we have a shared understanding of appropriate remedies when things go wrong even (or especiall6y) if that occurs without malice or deliberate self-service behavior. > I do share the concerns that others have expressed that > various policies disenfranchise various subgroups of folks. > Which is not good. Yes, me too. But, again, I am more concerned above situation where that happens as an accidental side-effect of poorly written or otherwise unclear rules and guidelines than when clever people figure out ways to work around the rules and deliberately exploit them to create the appearance of IETF consensus when none exists. I'd like to think that sort of behavior is actually rare. Even if it is not, our first defense against it involves rules and guidelines that the better-intentioned majority can and will interpret in consistent ways. john [1] https://www.ietf.org/about/groups/iesg/statements/interim-meetings-guidance/
