Since I am responsible for some of this text, let me add a couple of comments, in-line:
John C Klensin wrote:
3.5 Review and Appeal of IAD and IAOC Decision
The IAOC is directly accountable to the IETF community for the performance of the IASA. In order to achieve this, the IAOC and IAD will ensure that guidelines are developed for regular operational decision making. Where appropriate, these guidelines should be developed with public input. In all cases, they must be made public.
Additionally, the IASA should ensure that there are reported objective performance metrics for all IETF administrative support activities.
Back when I was actively doing political science, the belief that everything could be reduced to objective and quantifiable terms (the latter is what "metrics" means; if it isn't what was intended, some other word should be chosen) statements like this were described as "physics envy". The statement would be reasonable if "whenever feasible" or the equivalent appeared there somewhere -- we _can_ evaluate the IAOC on its interpretation of "feasible" and how far they are willing to go to satisfy the needs or curiosity of the community.
The "Additionally..." sentence came in when I had a section that was about responsiveness to the IETF community. The intent was that there should be metrics (and I do mean metrics) maintained with regard to various objective processes: RFC Ed queue, IANA queue, etc. This allows the community as a whole to have some insight into how the overall IETF machine is functioning.
Now that the section is about appeal and decision review, the text may be a little out of place. Or not -- because one should be able to flag when the whole system just doesn't seem to be cutting it. So perhaps it's a wording problem. I'm not inspired with alternatives.
... on the nature of the review request. Based on the results of the review, the IAOC may choose to overturn their own decision and/or to change their operational guidelines to prevent further misunderstandings.
This doesn't give the IAOC the option of saying "no, you are wrong [because...], and we aren't going to change anything". Combined with other text above, that would imply that any member of the community can force the IAOC into either changing a decision or changing the operational guidelines. The IAOC must be able to say "no you are wrong". If must even be able to say "you have raised fifteen objections in the last 30 days, all of which have been turned down by us and everyone in the appeals chain, please go improve you sand-pounding skills".
Agreed -- and I think Scott Brim flagged a different aspect of the same problem. I don't think there is anything intentional in not expanding this to include other options at the discretion of the IAOC. Perhaps removing it (as Scott suggested) is best. Personally, I'm as happy to leave those options in as explicit (but not limiting) examples.
Leslie.
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