--On Sunday, March 31, 2019 14:59 -0400 John Levine
<johnl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> In article <B21B6B71D3F3DFEAA8BE0666@PSB> you write:
>>> So I guess I'm curious - what problems are we having that
>>> cause people to think we need to make recalls easier, and
>>> could those problems be addressed in less disruptive ways?
>
> Just as a point of reference, how many recalls have we had?
>
> I can only think of one, in which we had to use the recall
> process to replace someone who had just disappeared and we
> have no other way to fill a seat of someone who is absent but
> not dead.
That is actually one more than the number we have actually had
because that one got as far as collecting signatures but not as
far as getting a recall committee appointed, much less removing
someone. What happened that that efforts to contact the
individual had proceeded in parallel with the
signature-collecting effort. The informal contacts worked, and
the person resigned, before the recall process ran to conclusion
or even a call for volunteers for the recall committee.
I don't believe that it is useful to go down the path of
counting recalls but, if one looks at the statistics alone, one
could reasonably conclude that:
* The number of recall efforts that got as far as selection of a
recall committee between 1996 (RFC 2027) and 2004 (RFC 3777) was
zero and hence the change from "anyone can initiate" to nomcom
eligibility and 20 signatures was not justified by any actual
experience of denial of service attacks, only speculation (and,
IIR, a near-miss or two) that they might occur.
* The number of recall efforts that got to that same point
between the time the rules were tightened in 2004 and the
present was also zero. From that, if we can conclude anything
at all, it would be that, with the possible exception of people
who disappear without resigning, either the procedure is too
hard or we have never had a leader who have misbehaved
sufficiently to justify removal from office.
If one believes that latter, and that one can extrapolate from
22 years of no recalls into the future, then we either don't
need the mechanism at all or we should got back to "anyone can".
On the other hand, should one believe that people might end up
on leadership bodies in the future (especially given that we
keep generating more of them) who might then behave in ways that
would justify recall actions _or_ if one believes that the
appearance of fairness toward all who participate actively in
the IETF is important, then changes of the sort proposed in
draft-moonesamy-recall-rev are worth making and the number of
past recalls is really not particularly relevant.
best,
john
