--On Wednesday, July 25, 2018 11:59 -0700 Randy Bush <randy@xxxxxxx> wrote: >> The thing is, AD is a job. Do we want the job to be done >> well, or not? If we want it to be done well, why is it a >> volunteer position? > > in the new IETF Corporation, will there be a dress code? will > ADs fly business class? As the risk of agreeing with Randy (this is beginning to feel like the good old days), let me add an observation that I think is consistent with his comments. Most of us have observed what happens when standards bodies and similar entities, including ones with regulatory effects (or close to them) start relying on paid staff to make the actual technical and organizational decisions. For those lucky enough to have avoided those situations, the result is almost always expanding and self-protective bureaucracies, concentration of power, and decisions that get made in ways that reflect the interests of those bureaucracies. In many cases, those jobs tend to attract people who can't or won't get jobs doing what the IETF might describe as "real work" -- design of protocols that have a succeed in the marketplace, implementation, operations, and so on. Let's not go there. I have to suggest that, if the IESG job has come to involve too many responsibilities and too much workload, it is at least partially because IESG members, over time, have chosen to allow that. I think that the community should be very concerned if we are simultaneously discussing an overloaded IESG and moving strategic responsibilities away from IASA and toward the IESG (see the IAOC plenary report). Whether splitting the IESG's management and steering functions away from document approval (as discussed in a draft I mentioned a few days ago) is a good idea or not --and I can argue that either way-- it would be a way to radically change the workload. There are certainly other ways and perhaps we should start with a serious review of the number of things the IESG needs to have its fingers in and what that costs. Similarly, there have been proposals in the past to adjust the workload the IETF takes on to match community resources (including IESG time); perhaps it is time to revisit them. Or we could figure out how to pay the IESG (and, by an extension of the same reasoning, the IAB and the LLC Trustees), and then start worrying about supporting those people in the style to which they would like to become accustomed and/or at a level corresponding to their perception of their importance. Dress codes, business class travel, deluxe suites in meeting hotels, etc., would be only a few steps behind. john