Re: On the IETF Consensus process

[Jeffrey Hutzelman <jhutz at cmu.edu>]

On Wednesday, May 23, 2007 06:56:10 PM -0700 Lakshminath Dondeti 
<ldondeti at qualcomm.com> wrote:

> Hi Jeff,
>
> On a first scan of your email I thought to myself, I agree with most of
> it and so pondered about the problem that I was trying to put forth in
> front of the community.  The conclusion was that indeed if everyone
> follows the rules and if the checks and balances work as they are
> supposed to, perhaps there are no problems.  Unfortunately though, our
> system of checks and balances is that people need to object, as you put
> it; often people at the losing end of an argument may object and thus may
> be dismissed.

This is a difficult problem.  I'm sure there are many cases where people 
should speak up and don't.  There are also a number of cases where someone 
who has legitimately lost refuses to accept that.  Unfortunately, the 
latter are usually much more easily observed.  If we could find a way to 
drastically cut down on either category without growing the other, we'd be 
able to make substantial improvements, both to the IETF and, if the 
solution scales, to society as a whole.  Unfortunately, it's a hard problem.



> Consider what happens if a WG chair or an AD's decisions are skewed,
> either intentionally or because they are naturally biased towards a
> particular philosophy?  Often people tend to try and live with it or
> adjust to it.  There is not really a viable avenue to provide feedback
> about the AD.  Appealing (happens rarely) or recalling (never happened?)
> are drastic measures.

Yes, they are, and no, the recall procedure has never been used.  I'm sort 
of torn on this - most every decision is appealable, and if an AD is making 
bad decisions and won't listen to reason, they should be appealed. 
However, if everyone appealed every decision they didn't like, we'd never 
get anything done.


> Next, I agree that all the decisions are public, but I will note that not
> many people have the bandwidth to know what all is going on (there are
> ADs who don't monitor WG mailing lists on a regular basis).  There is
> also the tendency to be silent hoping that other people will raise the
> issue.

True.

> For instance, I had started thinking more clearly about BoF processes and
> how a small set of people can derail a BoF process after I started this
> thread.  A few vocal people at the mic and secret reports from IAB
> members (conflicts of interest seem to go unnoticed) can undo months
> worth of work and the proponents have to wait 4 more months to do
> anything.  There is no reason it needs to be that way.

Sorry; I really want to answer this part, but I'm out of time for now. 
Perhaps I'll come back to it next week.

-- Jeff

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