I agree that "spokesperson" is not either the appropriate term. And leader is far far away to be representative of their roles and positions.
True that on their role they "lead" the organizations they are involved with but the Internet community does not follow them as *leaders*, particularly the CEOs of some organizations such as ICANN, ARIN, etc, that are just paid employees to play a specific executive role.
I'm really starting to dislike this effort of reverting the bottom-up process by a group that is starting to behave like a dictatorial junta making public statements that can be considered or interpreted as representative of the Internet community and particular organizations such as IETF.
They are no spokesperson, nor leaders, just they are what they are the CEO of ICANN, the Chair of IETF, the CEO of ARIN, etc.
My .02
Jorge
On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 6:20 AM, Ted Lemon <ted.lemon@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Folks, as John Klensin said, the reason we do not say "spokesperson" is that our leadership do not speak for us. We only speak as a group through the consensus process. So the term "spokesperson" is simply inaccurate.
The term "leader" makes sense as a generic because there were a number of organizations, with different leadership structures, some not involving the same consensus process that exists in the IETF. So we couldn't for example say "chair," because that term wouldn't apply to all the people who signed the statement.
I realize that the term "leader" has its own set of connotations, but I don't know of a better word to use. There is no word that we could use that would convey to someone who is not already familiar with IETF process what we mean. Representative is no good for the same reason spokesperson is no good. Avatar doesn't really work either.
I think it's better to just accept that the language is imprecise, and think carefully about what is that we might be objecting to, and whether the objection _really_ makes sense in the context. I guess there's about zero chance that this won't get discussed to death, and that's fine, but I don't think there's a knob to turn here.