Brian, Most of your points have already been addressed (and the two of you and others should certainly continue that conversation) but I want to make some observations on text for which I'm probably responsible, especially text that was probably carried forward from draft-klensin-recall-rev, and to add a few comments as an individual. --On Wednesday, March 27, 2019 17:26 +1300 Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >... > I agree with the general idea of lowering the bar for recall > petitions. But some of the discussion seems to overlook that > it's an extreme measure, and one that should normally be made > unnecessary by the regular appeal chain. Certainly for some cases, yes. But I think we need to keep one important distinction between the appeals process and recalls in mind. Our theory about appeals has mostly been that they are more of a "I think you folks got this decision wrong, possibly because you did not consider these issues, please think about it again". That is reflected in the fact that the first procedural step (or even pre-step) in a repeal is always to go back to the people most involved in the decision and ask that they rethink it. There is no necessary implication of bad behavior or bad motives and we try to avoid that. The first step is never to go directly to a higher body and to ask them to change the decision. Indeed, if an appeal of an IESG action ends up with the IAB, the IAB still cannot change the decision; it can only strongly encourage the IESG to reconsider. In retrospect, maybe we should have called the process "reconsideration initiation" rather than "appeal", but the former does not drop easily off the tongue. Recalls, by contrast, are directed at one or more individuals over some category of bad (or non-performing) behavior and are definitely an appeal (sic) to a different authority to overrule someone's staying in office. Consider: o Someone has stopped performing, disappears, and doesn't respond to stimuli. Nothing to appeal. Probably we need a better way to cope with that then the appeals process if only because the length of time needed to get signatures together, organize a recall committee, have it meet and agree to the obvious might be better spent with getting someone into the position, but that issue is outside the scope of this I-D. o Someone in a leadership position is consistently behaving badly in the decisions they are making, but in a way that is not really an appropriate topic for the ombudsteam. In many cases, this could be dealt with by one appeal, per incident, until the person involved either resigns or the other members of the relevant body resort to physical violence, but appeals, beyond a certain point, are really not the right answer if the person doesn't get the point after a very few of them. o Someone in a leadership body is, as the saying goes, consistently not playing well with other children to the point of impeding that body's work or, perhaps, is suffering from conflicts of interest that the other members of the body can override but that are consistently blocking or impeding progress. Some versions of this problem might be a topic for the ombudsteam; many are not. Because the bad behavior may not show up directly in decisions, appeals may not be feasible or relevant. This, incidentally, is one of the reasons why members of the leadership body should be able to initiate recalls. > If we make recalls > *too* easy we might be upset by the amount of distraction they > would cause. And that is why the shift from "anyone can initiate" to the current rules occurred. >... Some specific comments follow: > >> Abstract >> >> The procedures for initiating a recall specified in RFC >> 7437 restrict signatories to those who are "nomcom >> qualified". This document suggests those limitations were >> unanticipated and undesirable side- effects and proposes >> to remove them. > > I think the second sentence is untrue, I think the sentence was a carryover from draft-klensin-recall-rev-00 and the associated discussions (around 2005). Those discussions, such as they were, made it very clear that the exclusion of IESG and IAB members by the nomcom-eligibility rule came as a surprise to a significant number of people. Hence "unanticipated side effect". It almost certainly does need work for the current draft. >... > There are several other places in the Introduction and the > Rationale where there is a similar issue - if this text is a > BCP that changes the procedure, all references to the old > procedure need to be written in the past tense. IMO, it has been ambiguous for decades whether I-Ds that are intended to evolve into BCP (or other action-specifying) RFCs should be written in future tense (because the action is still a proposal and fixed by the RFC Editor) or past (because the action will have occurred by the time the document is published). If we are going to complain to authors about that, it is probably time that the IESG and RFC Editor (and, by the way, IANA) make and publicize a policy) rather than beating up on authors episodically. >... > Joke alert: maybe one's position on the "Narten list" should > determine eligibility. I'd be happy to increase both my number of messages and their length if you think that would help, or help make the above point :-) >... > But, as above: how do we verify remote participation, and why > not qualify people who have simply submitted drafts or been > active on mailing lists during the last two years? I think any simple rule one picks will turn out to generate hypothetical cases in which it might be pathological. Remembering that someone (or a company) can buy their way into Nomcom eligibility by paying to come to the meeting, register, and then do nothing of any use to the IETF or anyone else (doing email, playing tourist, going to the beach,...). One could make a case for remote participants being forced to actually get onto at least some Meetecho sessions as a participant to qualify, but suppose an equivalent qualification were imposed on f2f participants, e.g., by requiring signing a few blue sheets. If someone is included to game the f2f process, they either sign the blue sheets and leave the room or sign them and then sit and do email. Similarly, nothing prevents me from signing onto Meetecho as a participant and then leaving the computer running while I heard for the nearest bar or other facility. My guess is that we need to use some mechanism that prevents several people from getting upset about a particular event, meeting the petition qualifications, and initiating a recall. Almost anything that requires several instances of contact over a year or more should be sufficient to demonstrate at least token longer-term involvement. Trying to pin things down much more than that is likely, IMO, to descend into enough edge cases and odd situations to not be worth the trouble. best, john
