Jason, LLC Board,
I wanted to follow up my comments at the mic last night in plenary.
I asked what the strategic oversight imperative was behind your comment that the LLC Board was “simplifying contracts”; and, specifically, how you were translating that into a directive for your (eventual) Executive Director.
My point was not actually to argue whether the current contracts are perfect, or the merits/challenges of simplifying contracts.
Instead, my point was that what you described sounds awfully low level for the board to be engaging. Your reply suggested to me that you think it is obvious that simpler contracts are better and allow for less (legal) exposure for the IETF, but that doesn’t actually address my point.
The IAOC was often accused of having gotten too operational in the administrative workings of the IETF.
For an illustration of what happens when the oversight board implements the “obviously best approach to implementing administrative feature X”, I urge you to review the past history of financial representation for the IETF, which changed with the membership of the IAOC. Each one was “best” in the eyes of the then-current IAOC.
Among other things, moving to the LLC was meant to create an executive board that would be able to refrain from that sort of digging into the details.
So, I think the answer I was hoping for was more along the lines of: We have (or will) outlined the issues of exposure due to complexity of contracts to the Executive Director, and look for their proposals for addressing those exposures or motivating the complexity/identifying remediation paths.
That seems a lot more like the executive board identifying a (potential) strategic issue, and letting the implementors, who will actually hold the contracts and live with the contracts going forward, do the work.
In later parts of the plenary, which you’ll want to catch up with when the recording is available, concerns were raised from the community about the state of relationship with the people and organizations that are on the other end of those contracts. It did make me wonder whether complexity of contracts was our biggest exposure — breaking relationships with critical expert support could actually be a threat with a greater risk factor.
Best,
Leslie.
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Leslie Daigle
Principal, ThinkingCat Enterprises
