--On Friday, October 10, 2014 07:54 -0400 Eric Burger <eburger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > This is really tempting and has a lot going for it. However, > my main concern is once we build a bureaucracy, it never goes > away. In the case under discussion, the Division of > Applications would still be with us in 2050 (if the IETF > lasted that long). So, I think a professional secretariat > helping with the technology would help in the short term, but > will kill the relevance of the IETF in the long term. Eric, Yes, that is one of the important counterarguments although one can imagine cultural and structural safeguards against it. There are others, probably equally important. It is not an accident that many people in the IETF community have spent energy deriding the organizations that use that model and their outputs over the years. It is probably not particularly important but moving to more technical secretariat support does not require staff dedicated to areas. Some organizations do that, some don't. And, as soon as very long-lived WGs became common in the IETF rather than an exceptional case or two that many people accepted grudgingly but as necessities, we started to develop the patterns you describe with no help from a technically professional secretariat. The latter, if not controlled, would probably accelerate the trend, but one can ossify almost any environment. My broader point was that, as we start looking beyond seeing an issue with Apps and start wanting to make some adjustments into thinking about how our basic "steering" and management structure should evolve with the times, things similar to Stewart's model of AD-plus-assistants aren't the only alternative. There are others, including several variations on a more active technical/standardization role for the secretariat. Indeed, those two might converge at the point that one looked at Stewart's suggestion and asked how we could staff ADs and a bunch of assistants without turning everyone who is actually willing to invest time beyond one or two topics or WG into managers with no one left over to do the work: paying someone would be one fairly obvious answer, just as it has been the answer some minute-taking needs. If we really have an issue with Apps and Area boundaries, then let's address that issue. There is, however, a chance that the current Apps issue, the recent issues with Transport, increasing homogeneity in the IESG and exclusion of people who don't have strong corporate/organization support, and questions about work migrating out of the IETF that used to be obviously done here are part of a pattern. If that were the case, then, IMO, we should be taking a broader look at organizational structure and the evolving environment in which we work as more important than trying to tune one Area a bit. I took Stewart's comment as starting to address those broader questions --questions I personally think are important-- and tried to respond in the same context. john