Lakshminath, The WG Chairs and Ads are all human beings, are all skewed to some extent, and all have some philosophy whether strong or weak. I don't see how this can be avoided. The effect of this may not be what you expect. For example, one of these, realizing they have a bias towards X, may try to compensate and adjust their decisions so as to end up having an anti-X effect. Hopefully the element of randomness in the nomcom process decreases the correlation in the bias of successive IESG members. Assume you could come up with some metric and say that an official's decisions were 5 percent biased. Perhaps, by devoting an ever increasing amount of time and effort to controlling this bias you could reduce it. But every ounce of effort you apply in that direction is unavailable to contribute to technical efforts. And it is not clear how you measure bias in an un-biased way since everyone will have a different opinion of what biases there are and how big they are. In fact, as you continue to increase the time and effort being put into "controlling bias", you end up with things being controlled by those who have time and effort available to try to control the organization rather than make technical contributions. If you can find a miracle cure that improves IETF decision making while decreasing the informational and decision making load of the members of the IETF community, that would be great, but I'm dubious. Thanks, Donald -----Original Message----- From: Jeffrey Hutzelman [mailto:jhutz@xxxxxxx] Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2007 2:11 PM To: Lakshminath Dondeti Cc: Jeffrey Hutzelman; IETF Discussion Subject: Re: On the IETF Consensus process On Wednesday, May 23, 2007 06:56:10 PM -0700 Lakshminath Dondeti <ldondeti@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi Jeff, ... > Consider what happens if a WG chair or an AD's decisions are skewed, > either intentionally or because they are naturally biased towards a > particular philosophy? Often people tend to try and live with it or > adjust to it. There is not really a viable avenue to provide feedback > about the AD. Appealing (happens rarely) or recalling (never happened?) > are drastic measures. Yes, they are, and no, the recall procedure has never been used. I'm sort of torn on this - most every decision is appealable, and if an AD is making bad decisions and won't listen to reason, they should be appealed. However, if everyone appealed every decision they didn't like, we'd never get anything done. ... -- Jeff _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf