On Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 12:11:47PM -0500, Pete Resnick wrote: > On 10 Mar 2020, at 10:41, Nico Williams wrote: > > > ...the process we have for > > dealing with complaints is heavily biased against plaintiffs -- which is > > probably as it should be, as otherwise we might never get anything done, > > but then legitimate complaints don't get heard. I feel OP's > > frustration. > > Nico, could you (or others) expand on this? Yes. Challenging consensus is difficult. People with substantive commentary sometimes get tanks driven over them. I've a few stories of this. One fairly recent one involving the TLS WG. > I really think this is worthy of a separate discussion: What is it about the > current process that you find biased against those who bring up a dispute? If you get left on the rough side of consensus, whether rightly or wrongly, and you wish to challenge this, it's really difficult. You might have to file an appeal, and if you do you'll annoy and anger people who want their RFCs published a year ago. > (I take it we're talking about RFC 2026 section 6.5 > <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2026#section-6.5>.) Have you encountered a > bias in undertaking such a dispute? What I've encountered is that at the limit you have to appeal or give up, and how well things go before you get to that stage depends on how willing WG chairs and responsible AD are to actively mediate dispute resolution. The case I felt went really badly was the TLS DNSSEC extension. I don't want to summarize that here because it will be too easy to accidentally or unconsciously mischaracterize some detail and trigger a flame war. That case left many palpably angry, including myself. The resolution of that case, BTW, was that the WG decided to drop the work item and let each do their own extension via the ISE. IMO that is less than ideal because if it keeps happening then we're going to have a large TLS extension support matrix and our users will be sad. There's no easy way to challenge a consensus to drop a work item. What are you gonna do, appeal asking the IAB to force a WG to take on a work item it doesn't want to? A WG could even conclude out of spite if forced to do something it doesn't want to. So there was no question of appeal, really. But I do feel that the chairs and responsible AD did not help enough ahead of the WG throwing its hands up in the air -- that might be an incorrect perception though, as maybe the chairs and AD were simply unable to get the strongest personalities on either side of the dispute to compromise, but, too, I think they could have called the consensus rather than wait till the WG threw in the towel on the work item. > I have no doubt that this process is under-used (as a chair and an AD, I had I've reached out to chairs and ADs a number of times before, and that has worked, and can work where they're willing to. It's difficult to go beyond that to appeals. We do have to be done at some point with any one work item. There is good will to tend to. The OP of this thread's parent thread clearly felt much more strongly about their case than anyone did about the TLS DNSSEC extension. No one in the latter case felt so aggrieved as to post a "resignation request". > to actively encourage people to use the dispute process instead of just > giving up), but I've always assumed that it was just people not wanting to > "rock the boat", or not wanting to be seen as a "complainer", or thought There is definitely some of that. Or at some point a party gets exhausted and gives up. Some of this is that we're a somewhat academic bunch (RFCs count as papers now, no?) and you know how it is with academics: the lower the stakes the worse the infighting. > that nobody up the chain would take them seriously. Those are serious > problems and we should be figuring out how to address them, since people > bringing up failures is the only way we can stop bad things from happening > when a WG or someone in leadership gets tunnel vision and does the wrong > thing. However, this is the first time I've heard someone express that the > process itself is stacked against someone with a dispute. If that's true, we > should really talk about how to fix that. Not sure how to make it better, except maybe thus: it should be possible to get a review of how a dispute was resolved not so much as an appeal, but as a way to remediate problems to help alleviate _next_ dispute. Nico --
