--On Thursday, August 17, 2023 09:03 +1200 Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 17-Aug-23 05:04, Keith Moore wrote: >> On 8/16/23 08:43, Salz, Rich wrote: >> >>> The point I was trying to make, is that "we don't know" what >>> the IETF community thinks about the general concept of never >>> meeting at one of the regular meetings. That's not an >>> argument against CELLAR; I was trying to make an argument >>> for community involvement in deciding what the principles >>> and code, if you will, should be. > > However, there have been a handful of never-actually-meeting > WGs for many, many years, and no resulting appeals or > disasters as far as I know. So I'd be very surprised if the > community consensus was that this is a Bad Thing. Indeed it > would be odd for the community that practically invented > "on-line" to object to on-line-only decision-taking. > > Rather, in these days of carbon-awareness, I'd expect the > community to be highly supportive. Brian, Never-actually-meeting (and Randy's LTRU example) is different from the CELLAR situation as I understand it and nearly irrelevant to the concerns that drove the appeal. Specifically, one of those concerns was that WGs with regular, and very frequent, meetings might be bypassing the requirements (and intent) for actual decision-making on mailing lists. One thing about "never meet" is that, if it implies that everything gets done on mailing lists, then certainly there is no issue with discussion of issues and decision-making occurring anywhere but on those lists. I don't believe that if a WG has good reason for meeting online even twice a week for months (far more frequent than anything I've heard about) they should be prevented from doing that, only that the reason should be carefully examined and/or that progress should be carefully monitored to be sure that both the letter and the intent of the "on the mailing list" principle is being followed and that the way those frequent meetings are announced and handled do not exclude (even inadvertently) interested members of the community who do not routinely follow the WG's mailing list. I think that, to protect the community against the appearance of cabals leading WGs in ways that are inconsistent with IETF norms for openness and transparency, that examination and monitoring has to be external to the collection of active participants in the WG, presumably the responsible AD. And, above all, if we intend to change either the commitment to doing things on mailing lists or, e.g., the definition of "responsible" in "responsible AD", that should be done by a community process and IETF consensus, not IESG Proclamation, er, Statement. I'm working on a response to Carsten's note including the specific CELLAR example. best, john
