Hi Todd, I agree on your concerns but disagree with few issues, read my disagree reason below: Todd> Most of the vetting happens between parties offlist and no capture ..... AB> any organisation may have this behavior, but what matters is as long as you are participating to : monitoring input, questioning, suggesting, convincing others, writing I-Ds for the IETF, and making up your decisions. Todd>The IETF process of today is based on a 'consensus' process from a membership of zero. That in and of itself flies in the face of reason and ethical clarity. If there were formal members who came together in a framework that the IETF administered it would be OK but the process today is too easily abused. AB> it is greate that we are not memebrs, we are participants, because we become equal to any other, if memebrship then we will have a memebr for 10 years and a memeber for 5 years (not measuring efforts but time), but with the IETF we are just participants, the value or difference between us is only how much you participate and author I-Ds or IETF RFCs. There MAY be abuse to the consensus process only if the CHAIR does not consider the healthy discussion related. So we need something to avoid this. Todd> When the journey is completed the standard will automatically issue... no IESG no IAB pain no extra administrative overhead for a bunch of lifer type standards junkies... Just simple and clean access to the standard process. AB> standard process is greate as we have IESG and WG reviews, first because the authors will have to discuss through many things with the focused/expert IETF group, then secondly the IESG have a more general review which includes many other affects of the I-D with other WGs in IETF. Yes painful but healthy. Best Regards Abdussalam Baryun ++++++++++++++++ The mission of the Internet Engineering Task Force is to make the Internet work better by producing high-quality and relevant technical documents that influence the way people design, use, and manage the Internet. See http://www.ietf.org.