Harald,
I don't want to have this turn into a discussion among a handful
of current or recent IESG or IAB members, so will respond to
some of you note and then go quiet again. The bottom line, IMO,
is that if others in the community are not concerned about this
and willing to speak up, then PESCI and how it is being
positioned are what the IETF wants and deserves... and so be it.
--On Tuesday, 25 October, 2005 06:36 -0700 Harald Tveit
Alvestrand <harald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Some notes on a couple of your points.....
>
> --On 25. oktober 2005 08:48 -0400 John C Klensin
> <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> -----------------------
>...
>> (1) Design teams tend to self-constitute although they can be
>> selected. When they are selected by a WG Chair or AD, the
>> membership criteria are usually clear and then followed. In
>> this case, membership selection was filtered based, in part,
>> on the participants not being an activist and, specifically,
>> not having current drafts for reform. Yet the organizer has a
>> reform draft, and is generating new versions of it, and is an
>> exception. (20050923)
>
> I've never seen a design team that had clear mebership
> criteria..... apart from the self-selecting variety, the
> versions I've seen have all been "you look like good people;
> would you care to spend time here".
Sure. But this isn't an ordinary design team. The IETF Chair
issued a call for volunteers and explicitly stated criteria for
selection that he then proceeded to violate (not just with
himself but with you, since you are co-author of a process
reform draft that has just been last-called and a significant
contributor to some of the ISD/SRD work). Now perhaps the
"activist" / "author of drafts" criterion should be interpreted
much more narrowly as applying only to people who have proposed
changes to the process approval mechanism and have written
active drafts containing those proposals. That would exclude a
somewhat smaller population, I think limited to me, but would
have been an irrelevant criterion for PESCI membership selection
since I did not volunteer.
(Disclosure: I didn't volunteer not because I considered
this hopeless or because I was convinced that Brian
would not pick me (neither was the case), but because my
travel and non-IETF commitment schedule over the last
several months made it extremely unlikely that I could
meet PESCI's workload requirements.)
More important, there have been hints of the work of this effort
being approved by extraordinary means, it is reasonably rare
that a design team gets a BOF and then a significant block of
plenary time to present and discuss the results of that BOF at
the same IETF meeting, etc. Precisely because of the
complications of the leadership roles, other activities of this
effort need to be far more open, public, careful, and generally
sensitive to an open process and IETF community involvement than
usual. I remained silent because I hoped that level of
sensitivity would prevail and that this would be efficient. I
am not feeling very good about that right now.
>> (3) The "team" is expected to report at the Plenary, partially
>> on the basis of its BOF meeting, but the BOF ends only one
>> 50-minute break before the plenary. Not exactly time for the
>> team to meet, carefully consider the discussion at the BOF,
>> and prepare a report. Indeed, while it is reasonable to hope
>> for something else, this would appear to be a setup for the
>> "well, we just got a lot of input and are thinking about it,
>> stay tuned" reports that characterized the admin restructuring
>> process.
>
> I very much agree. We specified "must be before the Plenary"
> in the request for a slot, and did not specify *how long*
> before the plenary - and got the (IMHO) worst possible time.
> Then we didn't flag this as an emergency in the rescheduling
> phase. A mistake.
Obviously one that is not important enough to try fixing, given
that we've changed agenda scheduling a lot closer to actual WG
sessions than two weeks in advance and the IESG presumably has
considerable involvement and skin in this game. I don't want
to start second-guessing the IESG, the IAD, and the Secretariat,
but it looks to me as if, even at this late date, IPR (which is
scheduled in the 1850-1950 slot on Tuesday) is in the same Area
and would have most of the same conflict constraints as PESCI.
If PESCI is really important to be given that sort of plenary
time and is a team effort rather than a one-person show with the
team providing some occasional calibration, why not make that
swap or some other one?
> (note: at the time of the BOF request being sent in, Brian was
> acting as AD, and I was being proposed as BOF chair. With the
> reshuffling of the "oversight AD" role, Brian took over the
> chairmanship.)
I want to apologize in advance to you and Brian for the metaphor
I'm about to use, but I can't think of a better one at the
moment and I think the point has to be made strongly. As with
my earlier comments about the nature of meaningful reclusal, I
think the IETF is effective and its results meaningful only so
long as we can focus on content rather than form. In a
situation where we were looking, as a community, for technical
or policy recommendations, I think we all need to be much more
interested in the identify and behavior of the puppetmaster
rather than in the puppet(s). Small changes of formal roles are
unimportant if the underlying relationships are unchanged.
Brian remains General AD regardless on who on the IESG is
nominally responsible, Brian created PESCI on his own initiative
as General AD and IETF Chair and took rather extensive
responsibility for it, Brian is chairing the group itself and,
to judge from the public mailing, telling its participants
rather clearly what he wants discussed, and, regardless of who
is chairing the BOF, he is chairing the plenary and has
presumably exercised his authority as IETF Chair to give PESCI a
big slot of that agenda (half as long as the BOF session
assuming there is no discussion of its topics during the
slightly-open mike period. Maybe that is ok, but, IMO, making
and keeping it ok calls for a standard of openness and community
involvement that is not being met.
> To my mind, it is good that the PESCI BOF covers some of the
> ground covered before - ignoring it would have been extremely
> stupid.
Sure. But, based on the mailing list discussions and minutes,
the previous ground is being largely ignored. If it weren't
being ignored, I'd expect to see the discussions include a lot
interactions of nature of "the dead whale WG discussed this
issue and concluded XYY but was unable to do anything with that,
we can build on it by...". Instead, the appearance is that all
of those "old ground" issues are being discussed as if they were
new and there had been no previous community thinking about
them. And that is what I am objecting to. Maybe PESCI needed
to start with a clean page on the theory that all of the
previous efforts ended in futility or produced results that
didn't improve anything, but no one has said that. Without it,
precisely want seems to be going on is ignoring that prior work.
I'll let you characterize the intelligence of that as you like.
> Note on the relationship to NEWTRK:
> The issues PESCI is looking at - for instance the Chair role
> and the IESG role - are definitely *outside* the remit of
> NEWTRK.
But there has been some discussion of NEWTRK issues on the PESCI
mailing list that no one has declared out of order. There have
also been items on the Newtrk agenda or as part of its
discussions that PESCI does seem to be preempting or ignoring.
> Asking a group that is flailing/failing wrt its current scope
> to take on work beyond that scope is generally not what I
> consider useful.
Sure. But, if the IESG --or even the General AD-- have
concluded that Newtrk is flailing or failing, the
procedurally-correct action is to either reduce its scope to
topics on which it is accomplishing something or to just close
it. Neither of those things has been done. Instead Newtrk has
just been cut off at the knees by preempting some of its agenda
and, to some extent, starving it for resource (I note that it is
not scheduled to meet in Vancouver. That may be a fine
decision, but do you really believe Newtrk would not be meeting
if PESCI were not getting the attention of the relevant AD and
others).
Speaking only as myself.
john
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