On 8/16/23 15:02, Stephen Farrell wrote:
Hiya,
On 16/08/2023 18:04, Keith Moore wrote:
What's abundantly clear is that IESG should not be making such
decisions unilaterally. IESG is, inherently and by its very nature,
too short-term in its focus.
That short-term thing is a problem for the IESG yes. (Due
to workload demands and the difficulty of engineering
change I think.)
Due also to the very nature of IESG's work. IESG is constantly mired
in detail due to its duties of reviewing specifications, managing
working groups, and making judgments about minute bits of wording and
subtle decisions in highly technical documents. IESG gets exposed to a
fire hose of information that is useful to a big picture view, but it's
pretty difficult to think in terms of longer terms and big pictures when
you're constantly having to deal with minutiae.
It's nowhere nearly representative of the whole community; actually
it's been working hard to suppress parts of the community that it
doesn't like, and for dubious reasons.
FWIW, I don't think you're even near correct there, and your
in any case unconvincing claim is IMO badly damaged via the
pejoratives ("suppress", "dubious").
I realized after I posted my previous message that I shouldn't have
tried to combine those two claims in one message or thread, even though
to me they're very clearly related and appear to have the same
fundamental cause. I realize that I'd need more detailed support for
that argument to be convincing, and I wasn't really prepared to do the
research needed to provide that support.
(Though I think you probably realize that anybody who claims that he or
she is not prejudiced, is inherently making a dubious claim.)
For the moment, I'd like to focus only only the immediately visible
structural problem - people who are mired down in detail have a hard
time getting a big picture view. And similarly, people who are
selected to make difficult technical evaluations may not be well-suited
to making evaluations of other kinds. And vice versa.
Keith
p.s. one of my red flags for when an organization, or society, is
starting to fall apart, is that old compromises that served well for
decades begin to break down, and multiple people or factions start to
try to wrest control over it. e.g. IESG bypassing or doing end runs
around IETF consensus processes.
