> I certainly > endorse the position that we could use resources more effectively if [we] > exercised more care about which working groups [were] chartered. But, > again, the IESG makes those decisions: More care about chartering is cited periodically, and I agree that it is needed. But we seem able to get neither a clear, concrete sense of what it means to use more care, nor the community resolve to pursue it. Not really. On John's latter point that the IESG makes those decisions, I suggest that it is at the core of at least two serious problems: One is that is abrogates the community's responsibilities and the second is that it guarantees that the IESG remains overburdened. More and more, we see the general IETF community lacking a sense of responsibility for the health and utility of the IETF. Well, how can we feel responsible if we are disenfranchised? That is what it means to have others making the important decisions. The more we march down the path of having a classic, hierarchical authority structure, the more the IETF looks and acts like any other stiff, bureaucratic, unproductive standards group. The IETF's origins in rough consensus translated into community action and community responsibility. That goes directly against the idea that it is some elite oligarchy's authority to make the decisions. There is a long way between the highly centralized authority structure we now have, and the mayhem of an extreme literal democracy, where everybody 'votes' on everything. But the original style of the IESG was to facilitate processes of developing community consensus. Such a description is fundamentally at odds with a model that has that the IESG have primary authority for making the decisions. On the question of burden, the issue is simple: ADs often feel sufficiently essential, to what they view as the necessary details of an outcome, that they are more and more inclined to inject themselves into it. (One of the more poignant examples of this is when an AD gets sucked into "ensuring" quality by participating in the working group as if they were a primary technical contributor. At that point they are an individual advocate for particular details, and they cease to be able to perform their higher-level job of oversight.) Others in this thread have cited the IESG's job as assessing community consensus. This, I think, should be viewed as the core job of the IESG: coordinating macro processes based on assessments of community rough consensus (and looking for ways to develop it.) After all, any successful output from the IETF depends upon community adoption. In that regard, the rough consensus model is really the process of acquiring community ownership of the output, with the expectation that the ownership makes it more likely they will actually use it. Take away real community involvement in the decision and we lose the benefit of facilitating adoption. For all this, the technical expertise of an AD remains extremely important, but not as the basis for an AD "decision". Rather, it permits the AD to see problems and recruit community concurrence that there is a problem. The AD may well have insight to its solutions, but frankly that should be viewed as an unexpected benefit. Good ideas come from lots of places; as good as any particular AD might be, no one can expect that they will have special insight that is better than all others. Yet today we almost require it. Certainly the recent structure and history of IETF process "trains" ADs to view their personal preferences as being an ultimate authority. That is, after all, what the power of a veto communicates. If an AD is unable to recruit rough consensus to their view, then what exactly is the benefit of their being given a veto? d/ --- Dave Crocker Brandenburg InternetWorking +1.408.246.8253 dcrocker a t ... WE'VE MOVED to: www.bbiw.net _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf