Margaret,
I was quite dubious of your initial message but with the clarification of exceptions for personel, legal, and perhaps a few other matters, I don't have any problem with it. A typical case I think of is IESG discussion of WG chair candidates or of the possible replacement of a WG chair. These are important decisions and I do not think requiring their discussion to be public would improve the results.
Thanks, Donald ====================================================================== Donald E. Eastlake 3rd dee3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 155 Beaver Street +1-508-634-2066(h) +1-508-786-7554(w) Milford, MA 01757 USA Donald.Eastlake@xxxxxxxxxxxx
On Mon, 25 Oct 2004, Margaret Wasserman wrote:
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 12:26:02 -0400 From: Margaret Wasserman <margaret@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
...
Right. The point of a "sunshine law" is not that there should be no exceptions. There is a good description of the Missouri Sunshine Law at:
http://www.ago.state.mo.us/sunshinelaw/sunshinelaw.htm
This law captures the fact that government meetings and decisions should be as open as possible, while making reasonable provision for exceptions. I'm not from Missouri, so I have no experience with how this law has played out in practice.
The point is that openness should be the default case and privacy should be the _exception_. Yes, exceptions should be granted for discussions that truly need to be private, but those exceptions should have to be justified. Today, the default is that most of our leadership communications are private and a specific decision needs to be made by the leadership to make any substantive discussions public.
BTW, I am not trying to imply that there are any deep, dark secrets here. I honestly don't think that anyone would be shocked by what the IESG discusses (at least in my presence ;-)) and I don't think that anyone in our leadership is intentionally (or unintentionally) working against the best interests of the IETF. The presumed privacy of IETF leadership discussions, etc. is quite typical of corporate environments and no more evil or badly motivated than the behaviour of a well-run executive team. I am just arguing that it would be more appropriate to hold ourselves to the standards of good government, rather than to the standards of good corporate management.
I don't care about bureaucratic organizing and almost certainly would not read published minutes of whatever.
As I think you know, the value of a public record is not proportional to the number of people who read it. The value lies in the fact that people _can_ read it, if and when they find that necessary.
Margaret
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