Re: [Eligibility-discuss] Questions about I* bodies removing their own membership

On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 2:53 PM Samuel Weiler <weiler@csail.mit.edu> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 29 Oct 2019, John C Klensin wrote:
>
> > Hi.  I've been thinking about the idea of the I* bodies being
> > able to remove one of their own members and how to combine that
> > with adequate safeguards.  Let me make a specific suggestion to
> > see if it gets enough traction for me to draft some text that
> > could be dropped into the "equity" I-D.
> ....
> > that the person should be removed.  Or, perhaps even more
> > effectively, requiring each I* member who was going to vote
> > "yes" to sign a letter of resignation, creating a vacancy
> > immediately and taking effect as soon as a replacement could be
> > seated if the recall committee did not remove the person in
> > question.   "You want to fire an I* member, you put your
> > position on the line if the recall committee disagrees" has a
> > certain charm.  But I'm not yet persuaded that either would be a
> > good idea.
>
> This sounds remarkably similar to the idea in:
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-klensin-chair-empowerment-00
>
> which empowered the IETF chair to initiate a "him or me" process.  It
> has the advantage that if the recall committee disagrees, it only
> displaces one person (the IETF chair), not half of the I*.  As this
> document observes in section 5: "If different IESG members were able
> to use it on each other, there is too much risk of abuse or repeated
> invocations".

My concern with this is that the outcome of the recall committee isn't
guaranteed to be deterministic / always "right".

For the purposes of a thought experiment, let's say that I'm a useless
waste of space on the IESG - as well as not progressing my own
documents, I'm capricious, disruptive, unreasonably argumentative, and
lazy (I certainly hope that this is just a hypothetical).

Of these, the only one that has a verifiable metric is the "not
progressing my own documents" - for the rest of them, it's really hard
to know if a recall committee will be able to have seen the actions,
and neigh impossible to predict if they will agree that I should be
recalled. If the committee *does* agree to remove me, yay, the right
thing happened. If not, we instead lose someone who hasn't done
anything wrong - other than incorrectly predict which way some group
of people will "vote" (and, looking around the world these days, I'm
not certain that anyone can predict how a group of people will vote,
and certainly the "right" outcomes isn't guaranteed). If I were the
chair, the situation would have to be *very* dire before I'd risk my
neck on that...

What's more, the person who we'd be losing is someone with a skillset
that cannot easily be replaced by other members of the IESG -- if a
random IESG person is replaced, they either have a co-AD, or their
work can be reshuffled -- but, the chair has a different set of skills
(it's also a role which, I suspect, most of the IESG wouldn't want to
have to cover!).

What was pointed out on the call (and, after being pointed out is
blindingly obvious!) is that there are 15 people on the IESG - if the
petition limit were dropped to 10 (and IESG members could initiate /
sign petitions) this would be more than enough to start the ball
rolling.

W

>
> -- Sam
>
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-- 
I don't think the execution is relevant when it was obviously a bad
idea in the first place.
This is like putting rabid weasels in your pants, and later expressing
regret at having chosen those particular rabid weasels and that pair
of pants.
   ---maf