Re: [Eligibility-discuss] Handling the fear of "bogus" recall petitions

Nicely said, Richard. And to be fair to Eliot, he started off trying to qualify a number of ways of counting participation.

And that just leaves us trying to measure who is “much more affected” in a relatively simplistic way so that we avoid complex evaluations and appeals and such like.

The current system tried to summarise all of these aspects through the raw measure of attendance. That is, it wasn’t using attendance for its own sake (although, obviously, as you note, one of classes of people who are affected), but as a crude measure of who was contributing in all of the various ways.

So, what is going on here is to recognise that the existing measure is excluding a group of people who contribute just as much in various ways, and to try to find a simple way of including them. Obviously, there is no intention to open us up to harm, but a strong feeling that we need to attempt to be fairer.

Thus, the proposal was to use repeated remote attendance over a period as a measure. There may be other measures and discussing them would be good. But those I have heard so far tend to get complicated quickly.

Best,

Adrian

From: Richard Barnes <rlb@ipv.sx> 
Sent: 25 October 2019 13:52
To: Eliot Lear <lear@cisco.com>
Cc: adrian@olddog.co.uk; eligibility-discuss@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [Eligibility-discuss] Handling the fear of "bogus" recall petitions

I'm puzzled by the focus on meeting attendance and acculturation here.  The former is at best an obsolete metric; the latter is so vague as to be useless.

Let me try to articulate propose a different operating principle here, one effectively of self-determination: A person should have a say in a decision if and only if they are affected by the outcome.  I think this principle leads to the right result in the base case, and provides helpful insights in the recall/NOMCOM case.

By "the base case", I mean: Who gets to participate in the development of IETF specifications?  While some are affected more than others, IETF technologies have impacts for the whole Internet, so it makes sense that anyone involved in the Internet should have a say -- and nowadays, that's basically anyone.

With regard to NOMCOM and recall, this raises the question of who is affected by the choice of who is on the leadership bodies.  Clearly not everyone; your average user of the Internet has no reason to care who's on the IESG.  Meeting attendees are affected to a degree, since the NOMCOM-appointed leadership is in charge of setting the agenda and the norms for participation.  The people who are much more affected by the leadership are those who are actively participating in document production -- people who have authored documents, participated in discussions in meetings, contributed to last calls, chaired WGs, etc.

--Richard

On Fri, Oct 25, 2019 at 6:51 AM Eliot Lear <lear@cisco.com <mailto:lear@cisco.com> > wrote:

Hi Adrian,

> On 25 Oct 2019, at 12:18, Adrian Farrel <adrian@olddog.co.uk <mailto:adrian@olddog.co.uk> > wrote:
> 
> So, if I might rephrase, you are worried about:
> - gaming the system (as previously noted)
> - not understanding the IETF culture and attempting
>  to make it that which it is not.
> 
> I hope I have that right.

That’s close enough wording to what I am thinking.

> 
> Asides from the fact that that leads to perpetuation and ossification, I think we are agreed that "some level" of established participation is required.
> 
> Now, I would argue that physically attending three IETF meetings does not do much more than show financial support from a sponsor organisation. I might even suggest that there are a few people who have attended a number of IETF meetings who really have no clue how the IETF works: they "vote" on mailing lists; they post individual drafts and are upset that no one converted them to RFCs; they don't read the drafts. So let's not make the barriers for remote participants such that we embarrass ourselves.
> 

Yes, we have had all of that.  None of this guarantees clue, and quite honestly, to address your other point, the culture sometimes does have to change. So long as that is a conscious change, that’s fine, but not knowing the culture means it would not be.

> On the other hand, I do agree that we need to see remote participants as, in some sense, full participants before considering that they can start a recall. So we are just arguing about the detail.
> 
> You (it seems to me) are suggesting a large number of potential criteria against which we can measure "involvement". I am looking for a more simple measure just like the 3-of-5 that we apply for physical presence where we don't additionally require co-authoring of I-Ds or some such.
> 
> I think we could arrive at an easy bar such as 5-of-6 when less than 3 have been physical.

I would be happy if someone attended so much as once, such that the 3/5 would apply. The lengthy criteria was just meant to lower the bar as far as possible, but one can certainly at least start simple.

> And I'm happy to talk about that. But the question of "culture" comes down to this: what is the IETF culture and where is it documented?

Oh I don’t even think we have to go that far.  So long as someone has an educated perspective, their entitled to decide that for themselves.

> Do I understand the IETF culture? Do you?

Yes, we both do.  But our understandings may differ ;-)

Eliot

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