Re: comments on your comments....

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

>thank you for being the only iesg member to date (besides myself), to
>suggest that we should try to make some forward progress.

Marshall, I think others have been trying to do so in their own way too, but
have been put off by a sense that this whole enterprise was projected into
an adversarial situation (intentionally or unintentionally).

>in practice, however, if we fix this via the wg process then we are
>talking about a six month delay -- even if a design team comes up with
>the text initially.

I'm not sure I used the term "wg", and, at least in retrospect, didn't
intend to.  If I correctly understand the process you are proposing, you
want to (presumably for this case only)

 (1)  remove the Sun topic from the IESG/Secretariat/ISOC loop 

 (2)  hand it over to a self-defined "community agreement" collection of people

 (3)  let a [self-] selected subset of them sign a document and collectively
take over the technology

 (4) bypass, avoid, or ignore any legal review of the above sequence and
acceptance process on the theory that the people who are comfortable with it
will sign and those who aren't, won't.

Now I'm not convinced that is a good idea.  And I learned enough paranoia at
my father's knee that I certainly wouldn't sign an agreement on that basis.
But I'm happy to go along with real community consensus if it is there, and
if it is there for a change in procedures, not just a precedent that we
abandon written rules and fall back on assertions and interpretations of
unwritten universal truths when the written rules are inconvenient or too slow.

But, if the consensus is there -- both that this process is worth doing and
that it is important enough -- there there ought to be enough consensus to
insert steps 0.1 and 0.2:

(0.1) Write up a set of procedures that permits the above process and spells
out the conditions (I presume either a working definition of paralysis or a
community antagonism level in decibels or degrees Kelvin) under which it
can/should be applied.  And write up the process itself (if the summary
above is accurate, it is a start).

(0.2) Post it as an I-D and issue a four week Last Call.   

Could that turn into six months instead of four to six weeks?  Of course it
could.  But having it do so would, IMO, require either serious malfeasance
on the part of IESG (e.g., refusing to take something to ballot), rather
than just nonfeasance or paralysis or trying to proceed carefully or would
demonstrate that the community wasn't, after all, concerned and focused
enough on this to converge quickly and clearly.

   john