John-
Thanks for your note. A good reset of the discussion, IMO. Some chiming in and a question below...
On Sep 14, 2004, at 2:12 PM, John C Klensin wrote:
We have
exactly two problems:
(1) For a number of policy and budgetary reasons, having two revenue sources that have to be kept isolated from each other lies on a scale between "suboptimal" and "nuts".
(2) The IESG perceives that they are not getting adequate support for their work, and the standards process more generally, from the Secretariat and that, despite considerable effort, there has been little progress on solving that problem.
Yes, my understanding as well.
And the guarantee of responsiveness, in _any_ organizational structure in which administrative/financial management are separated from standards management, lies in mutual trust and mutual understanding of goals and objectives, not in discussions of, e.g., who can blow whose bolts.
strongly agree.
The question, then, is whether we can devise a scenario that addresses the critical path questions without inventing any more administrative structure than needed, without depending on unreasonable expectations of the skills of the IETF _technical_ leadership, and without compromising the apparent and actual independence and ability of the IETF to develop good technical standards without undue influence from funding sources.
Agreed.
To reprise, the criteria for that alternative administrative organizational structure should include:
(i) The IETF volunteer (standards process) leadership and, for that matter, anyone with responsibility for steering the standards process, is at arms-length from financial dealings with particular donors who might be assumed to be influencing the IETF's standards process.
(ii) Nomcom appointments to IETF volunteer technical/ standards process leadership positions are not expected to require that candidates have significant administrative or financial skills, nor are candidates expected to acquire those skills on appointment.
(iii) We put as much IETF energy into organization-creation as is actually needed to solve identifiable and real problems, and no more. In particular, we don't try to create elaborate structures to handle hypothesized problems that have not occurred and probably will never occur, nor do we try to use IETF Administration as a way to develop and carry out unnecessary social experiments.
john
So, from this I guess you don't like scenarios C & D? :) Does this mean you do like scenarios A & B? Or are you suggesting that some other as-yet-unspecified solution will meet criteria (i) - (iii) above and solve problems (1) & (2)?
--aaron
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