Hi, SM,
On Fri, Mar 15, 2019 at 7:13 PM S Moonesamy <sm+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Spencer, Adrian,
At 01:01 PM 15-03-2019, Spencer Dawkins at IETF wrote:
>Ironically, the first RFC I was responsible for after joining the
>IESG was https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc7026/, which neither
>Adrian nor Stewart could shepherd because they were both recused. So
>they moved the document to an AD outside the area, and that's why
>there is one RTG RFC that includes me in the datatracker history.
I am not commenting about the above as my previous message was not
about that. There were comments on a thread [1] previously. Is it
appropriate or not to perform an "AD review" of a WG draft for which
the Area Director and author share the same affiliation? There could
be a perception of partiality.
There certainly could be.
I believe the practice at IETF over a period of years is to focus on technical points, so one would hope that an AD would confine an AD Evaluation to technical aspects of a draft.
These are pretty much all visible to the working group (at a minimum), so one one would hope that a biased AD Evaluation would be challenged by the document shepherd, working group chairs, draft authors, and working group participants (I list these in no particular order).
If that perception of partiality can't be resolved as part of normal discussion, the appeals process described in https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2026#section-6.5 would apply, and the working summary of that process that I've been working under is "any decision can be appealed".
Beyond that ... much like practices around IPR disclosure, we expect all participants, including ADs, to participate as individuals, and one side effect of that expectation is that our reputations are our own - saying "I think this because my funder tells me to think it" damages our own reputations, rather than reflecting on our funders.
Beyond that ... the Nomcom position review process, and the recall process, described in https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7437 would apply.
My experience - and that may vary for other folks - is that the only way to participate successfully in the IETF for any extended period of time is to make sure that we focus on technical considerations, and the cases where I've seen someone's opinion change as a funder changed have not reflected well on those participants.
Spencer
