As many will remember from the IETF 58 plenary presentation, I'm a big fan of functional differentiation. Though I try not to be dogmatic in its application, I believe there are a lot of cases where the creation of well-focused groups with limited goals is more successful than the creation of groups with larger scale but more diffuse goals. I think it makes it easier to know what success will look like when a group does its job well; I think it makes it easier to train people to do those jobs, and I think it is easier to recruit people into the roles.
As I, personally, look at the choices in front of us for administrative restructuring, I find that preference manifesting itself in the question:
"In which of these scenarios do folks best get to concentrate on their real jobs?"
The conclusion I come to at the moment is that scenarios in which the administrative work is done by a different entity than ISOC meet the test better. This isn't because I think ISOC isn't willing to do the work, or concern over disengagement, or anything to do with how ISOC relates to IETF as a standards-setting organization. The work is just sufficiently different from the role I see for ISOC that I would rather we have ISOC and the administrative support entity as two separate, functionally distinct organizations.
I want to see ISOC working to educate policy makers. I want to see ISOC educating engineers in emerging areas. I want to see ISOC fighting for freedom of expression on the net.
To me, those are ISOC's real job. I think it is very, very important, and I think the existing relationship between the IETF and ISOC is an important part of making sure that ISOC can do that job.
But that does not mean ISOC should take over worrying about the IETF's administrative details. Worrying over the scalability of a ticket system is an administrative job. Getting an agenda for biweekly meetings together in advance and minutes out after is an administrative job. Worrying about the scheduling of 130 probably conflicting working groups into twelve rooms over 5 days is an amazingly hard administrative job. All of those jobs are critical to keeping the IETF functioning, and I value them all highly. But the skills needed for them are not the same as policy outreach, or technical training, or editorial persuasion.
To put this in more IETF-typical terms, does this look like one area or two? To me, two. I recognize that there is an increased overhead in keeping two organizations going, but I think the benefit in focus is worth it.
Just two cents from an IETF participant, regards, Ted Hardie
_______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf