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

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

--On Friday, 25 October, 2019 08:52 -0400 Richard Barnes
<[e-mail]> wrote:

>...
> 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. 

Actually, while I can't speak to "average", I think there is a
situation in which the "average user of the Internet" might be
significantly affected by who is on the IESG.  Consider a
possible situation that, AFAIK, has never occurred but to which
we have occasionally come uncomfortably close.  Suppose that the
actions and decisions of a particular IESG had the appearance of
being strongly motivated by the interests, product designs, or
semi-proprietary protocols of their employer (or other vendor to
whom they have financial ties).  That is a problem.  By
potentially warping the marketplace as well as IETF decisions,
it could have an effect on users of the Internet who, under
normal circumstances, would have no idea what an "IESG" is.  I
don't see a sequence of appeals as a particularly good way of
dealing with a problem like that, especially if it cannot be
mitigated by someone counseling the problem AD into stopping the
behavior involved.   At that point, it seems to me that those
who were being hurt -- both users and competing companies who
might not have employees actively participating in the IETF and
maybe others -- would have, AFAICT, two possible alternatives.
One is an effective recall procedure; the other would be to seek
legal action against the IETF for not properly managing that
type of conflict of interest.  I think we would want to avoid
the second if at all possible (especially since, for those who
remember hearing about it, the ASME case and some similar ones
may suggest that we might lose).   That doesn't suggest that we
should go back to "the anyone can initiate a petition of RFC
2027" and its immediate successors.  It does suggest that, to
the extent possible, having a process that is not obviously
discriminatory toward some group of active participants is
probably wise.

   john