--On Thursday, January 16, 2020 16:10 +1300 Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> "Can the work of the IAB that you contribute to impact >> future financial results of your employer / sponsor ?" > > I think that's easy. Read the arguments that you, as a > candidate, made to your employer to justify you spending time > and travel budget on IAB membership. If those arguments do not > explain how IAB membership will positively affect your > employer, answer "No". But in that case, I rather doubt that > your employer would have allowed you to accept the nomination. > Mine certainly wouldn't have. > > In other words, the only credible answer to this question is > "Yes". >> If one would answer YES, does that constitute a COI ? > > Poetntially, yes. Even a self-employed engineer has this > potential COI. It's something I lived with as a WG chair, IAB > member, IESG member, ISOC Board member, and for that matter in > completely other non-profit roles at various times. Brian, I think you are right, but I also have to agree with Randy. Someone working for an organization that is willing to have them participate in the IETF because of a commitment to the general health of the Internet and that is willing to accept their acting against the best short-term interests of the company's products is a rare situation, but one that several of us have been in at one time or another. In some ways, that is the ideal, at least as long as we don't increase costs of participation enough that only the largest organizations can play. But, even then, if the individual is nearly as opportunistic as some of the comments in this thread imply that a policy needs to look out for, then the individual might still reason that, if the company's products do well this year, then there will be bigger bonuses next year and therefore be biased toward those products. I stopped commenting several days ago because I tried to write an explanation of why someone with projects or clients that could not be made public might still be an appropriate participant in the IAB. I realized that the explanation is too complicated if the policies have to be simple. I also realized that, if I were working for a company whose primary business was the making of soap or breakfast cereal, it might be hard to identify conflicts of interest without an in-depth job and departmental description and companies often consider that sort of information (and organization charts beyond some level of detail) to be sensitive ... a situation not very different from a consulting contract that barred either party from disclosing the relationship without mutual agreement (and that might have been insisted on by the consultant rather than the company). FWIW, I have never had any trouble getting permission to disclose arrangements that are, formally, non-public or confidential to Nomcoms: but the rules and the culture there have seemed offer more than adequate protection of the information. Where this all leads me is back to a point that others have made in different ways. For the technical work of the IAB, we want and need as much diversity of opinions, technical expertise, and perspective as we can get. That is, as long as the people involved really are experts and their expertise includes knowing what they don't know. IAB members might be biased as much or more because of personal technical preferences than because of financial interests (however described or measured). If we decide the former are ok and the latter aren't, we are not only going to find ourselves splitting hairs and exploring rat holes, but do each other --and the IAB's historical core technical mission-- a disservice. As an extreme, and I hope silly, example, if the Nomcom, in its wisdom, decided to appoint someone to the IAB who was the main advocate of a protocol or device that claimed to make physical limits on IP based on the speed or protons or electrons in a vacuum irrelevant, in technical discussions, I'd want the IAB to hear and evaluate that perspective and to do so independent of whether the individual stood to make zillions of dollars if the protocol proved successful. I'd also want the IAB to hear from the members best equipped to explain why, for Internet purposes at least, protocols or devices that require trans-light speeds to work properly are not going anywhere, independent of what they might stand to gain from upholding those positions. If either or both of those types of positions should not be represented in IAB discussions, then we are a problem with the way nomcoms work or with that absence of an effective recall mechanism, neither of which will be helped by a complex and hair-splitting COI policy. If we need very different policies for the IAB's technical and architectural work than for its more administrative or representational functions, it is likely that there are different skill sets for those functions as well. And maybe someone who has real or imagined conflicts should be isolated from the latter even while being a valuable asset for the technical and architectural work. If that is the case, maybe it is time to reconsider the IAB and whether some of its functions belong somewhere else. The perceived need for a formalized COI policy may be another argument that it is time to rethink the IAB, but it is not a solution. I think the bottom line is that this policy, at least as currently written, is unlikely to be helpful in difficult cases and may easily be damaging. Nomcoms need to select IAB members who hold openness and transparency in sufficient respect, and who have a strong enough of personal ethics, that issues that might affect their judgment on technical issues will be disclosed to other IAB members and, if appropriate, the community and who are willing to keep in confidence anything that is told them in confidence. If Nomcoms can't be counted on to do that, probably nothing else matters because people with less integrity (a problem I don't think we have seen) can always lie about their conflict. If Nomcoms cannot do that reliably with the tools they have available, then we have a different kind of problem, but, again, complex COI policy statements are not going to fix it. And, again, if we have given the IAB responsibilities --financial, administrative, or otherwise and direct or indirect-- that do require this sort of statement, let's work at separating those responsibilities as incompatible with what I still believe is the IAB's primary role, rather than things it ended up with post-POISED because we didn't have a better plan and other non-architectural tasks that have accumulated since. regards, john