Brian E Carpenter wrote: > > Martin Rex wrote: > > > > My impression of todays IESG role, in particular taking their > > balloting rules and their actual balloting results into account, > > is more of a "confirming body" of work that happened elsewhere > > (primarily in the IETF, typically in IETF WGs, but also individual or > > interest groups submissions from elsewhere, though the latter mostly > > for (re)publication as informational). > > > > IMHO, the IESG is not (and maybe never was?) a committee where _each_ > > member reviews _all_ of the work, where _each_ forms his very own opionion, > > and where all of them caste a VOTE at the end, so that the diversity > > within that committee would be vitally beneficial (to anything). > > I think you've misinterpreted the IESG procedures a bit. The definition > of a NO OBJECTION ballot in the IESG ranges from "I read it, and I have > no problem with it" to "I listened to the discussion, and I have no problem." I don't think so. When I had a phone call with Russ Housley in early 2010, one of the things I said was that considering the amount of document that pass through the IESG, I would assume that not every AD was reading every document and that each AD might be reading only about 1/4 of them, and he replied that this could be near the real numbers. > > It's impossible to say objectively which of these extremes predominates, > but when I was General AD, I tried to at least speed-read every draft, > and studied the Gen-ART reviews carefully. Individual ADs vary in their > habits according to workload, but my sense is that there is a strong > sense of collective responsibility and definitely not a sense of > rubber stamping. I do not think that the IESG is actively rubber stamping, and I know of a few past events where the IESG actively resisted to such attempts. However, the ballot process is made to err towards publication of a document. How often does the IESG *not* publish documents, and why? Considering the effort it took to convince IESG not to take an action / publish a document (IIRC draft-ietf-v6ops-6to4-to-historic-04.txt) then I'm much less convinced that having a ballot procedure that fails towards action/publication is such a good idea. -Martin