Re: WG management

[Henning Schulzrinne <hgs at cs.columbia.edu>]

Brian E Carpenter wrote:

> To be blunt, I believe this is a direct consequence of our open door,
> individual participation ethic. If you want firm resource commitments,
> you have to ask corporations and other organizations, not individuals,
> to make the commitment. When you have firm corporate commitments, you can
> do resource planning. It becomes a different game. This is definitely
> a case of being careful what you wish for.

At least in the areas where I hang out, almost all participants are paid 
for by (large) companies. The work is being done on company time and 
companies often claim credit for their contributions to standards 
bodies. We are not the local soup kitchen where people serve for 
charity's sake. One would hope that somebody taking on significant 
resource commitments clears this with their management if it is not 
already part of their job description.

Given the effective monopoly of the pen granted to authors, the 
community has, I believe, a right to expect timely delivery in return. 
This is no different from, say, being asked to chair a conference in the 
IEEE and ACM - unpaid volunteers, but there's a very definite 
expectation of performance, and mechanisms to "encourage" such performance.

There is the old saw about the "bias of low expectations". We compete 
for time with other commitments authors (and WG chairs) have. If we 
convey the message, implicitly at least, that our work can wait, it will 
wait.

Henning


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