--On Monday, September 10, 2012 15:07 -0400 Andrew Sullivan
<ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 11:26:29AM -0700,
> ned+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
>> > No, the response is that we refer you to our policy. As an
>> > open organization we do not remove information once posted,
>> > except under extraordinary circumstances.
>>
>> Exactly. This sort of thing is wh a policy is needed
>
> I attempted to hint at it already in this thread, but frankly,
> this sort of thing is why a policy _is not_ needed. The IESG
> has that discretion already, and I would prefer to trust their
> judgement than to write a policy governing all future action,
> thereby running the risk that we'll have overlooked something
> and having a resulting problem with policies down the road.
Or, to be more specific, that we will encounter a situation that
no one quite anticipated, know perfectly well what the rational
and appropriate action is, and find that we can't take it
because we established policies that tied our hands.
> I do not understand this nearly constitutional obsession with
> writing down policies for everything we do and don't do. It
> turns us into a bureaucratic process slaves for no benefit I
> can see.
I've said this before, but one of the things that used to
distinguish the IETF from other standards bodies is that we
operated with good sense and leadership discretion as our
guides, spending as little time as possible on the specification
and adoption of rigid procedures. We believed and behaved as if
IESG and IAB positions could be filled on a part-time basis,
needing people to dedicate a day or two a week from their
regular jobs, not require that they devote full-time to those
positions and do the rest of their jobs (if any) in their spare
time. When someone showed up and said "I don't really know
anything about the Internet and almost nothing about
engineering; I'm just a procedures guy and I wasn't to help", we
would help him understand that he was in the wrong place.
We might have responded to claims that more procedures make
things easier in cases like this by noting that handling the
actual number of take-down requests a year on a case-by-case
basis would take years to reach the break-even point with the
number of IESG hours that have presumably been spent following
this long (and predictable) thread, much less the costs to the
community of participating in it. We might also have suggested
the possibility of the IESG delegating the work to some other
group or committee -- if there are ever so many requests that
the IESG would find the time it takes to evaluate them
burdensome, we might be happy with a small committee (volunteer,
IESG-designated, chosen at random, or a combination and ideally
including Counsel) and subject to appeal on the basis that what
can be taken down can be put up again).
Clearly the IETF has changed. My colleagues at ANSI, INCITS,
and JTC1 would have claimed that it was inevitable with growth
(and maybe with age). And maybe I'm just old and nostalgic.
But I suggest that, if we need rigid procedures like this, the
debates it takes to get to them, and to the full-time
"standardizer" leadership to which history should teach us that
they ultimately lead, we probably have the wrong organizational
and decision-making structures and need to look forward to
structural reforms that will make the post-Kobe ones of the
early 1990s look like a minor adjustment. Or we can voluntarily
turn the trend around, one step at a time, starting with
rejecting this proposed statement in favor of discretion,
flexibility, and intelligence (and definitely not a statement/
policy of even more complexity) and maybe even including "do we
really have resources for this" among the criteria used to
evaluate the creation or continuation of WGs.
best,
john