No communication: #746 IAOC decision making

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In the -03 version of the document, the following text occurs:

3.4  IAOC Decision Making

  The IAOC attempts to reach all decisions unanimously.  If unanimity
  cannot be achieved, the IAOC chair may conduct informal polls to
  determine the consensus of the group.  In cases where it is
  necessary, some decisions may be made by voting.  For the purpose of
  judging consensus or voting, only the "voting members" (as defined in
  Section 4) shall be counted.  If voting results in a tie, then IAOC
  chair decides how to proceed with the decision process.

  IAOC decisions are taken by a majority of the non-conflicted IAOC
  members who are available to vote, whether in person or via other
  reasonable means determined to be suitable by the members of the
  IAOC.  The IAOC decides further details about its decision-making
  rules.  These rules will be made public.

  The IAOC shall establish and publish rules to handle conflict of
  interest situations.

  All IAOC decisions shall be minuted, and IAOC minutes shall be
  published regularly.

Scott Bradner raised the issue that he thought this section should include quorum rules. This debate forked:

- Rob Austein and I argued strongly that the IAOC should set those detailed rules, and that the BCP was not the right place to put them; Brian Carpenter and Bert Wijnen spoke out in support of that.

- Scott Bradner, John Klensin, Avri Doria, Brian Carpenter and Spencer Dawkins made (good) suggestions on what the quorum rules should be, including interesting topics like emergency powers, appropriate technologies for voting, the interaction between rules for conflict of interest and quorum rules and so on - but apart from the comments from Brian early in the discussion (not needed) and Scott's (which I interpreted as saying it needed to be in the BCP), I did not see any explicit statement in their comments on whether the quorum rules needed to be in the BCP or not.

My personal opinion is that the debate has given compelling evidence that quorum rules are NOT easy to get right, which also leads me to believe that we will need to change them on a shorter timescale than the expected rate of change of the BCP - thus that they should NOT be in the BCP; the BCP should just require that they are public. (a rule that says "two people in a closet" is probably a short road to the recall process...) But this process is not about my opinion, but the IETF's opinion.

So - Scott, can you confirm that you think quorum rules should be in the BCP? Rob, can you confirm that you think they should not be?

Brian, John, Avri and Spencer: Can you state if you have an opinion about whether or not the quorum rules should be in the document or not?

Let's get this point settled before we dig into what the quorum rules should be - if they don't go into the BCP, the whole text of #746 gets passed as "advice from the IETF community to the IAOC".

                    Harald






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