RE: On the IETF Consensus process

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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

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