Re: [Eligibility-discuss] Warren Kumari's No Objection on draft-ietf-elegy-rfc8989bis-04: (with COMMENT)

John C Klensin <john@jck.com> Wed, 01 February 2023 17:56 UTC

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Date: Wed, 01 Feb 2023 12:56:19 -0500
From: John C Klensin <john@jck.com>
To: Warren Kumari <warren@kumari.net>, The IESG <iesg@ietf.org>
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Subject: Re: [Eligibility-discuss] Warren Kumari's No Objection on draft-ietf-elegy-rfc8989bis-04: (with COMMENT)
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--On Wednesday, February 1, 2023 08:20 -0800 Warren Kumari via
Datatracker <noreply@ietf.org> wrote:

> It's not really clear to me what a "false affiliation"
> actually is -- in some other organizations, where voting is a
> thing, it is common for there to be lots of one or two person
> consulting companies. These consultants all have different
> affiliations, they just *happen* to have contracts with the
> same larger organization, and also just *happen* to all vote
> in the same way... Would these be false affiliations? 

Just to add a bit to that excerpt of Warren's comment:

In some contexts, we have asked consultants to disclose whom
they are working for.  But there are at least two situations for
those consultants.  One variety, while technically consultants,
are working exclusively (or nearly so) for one company.  Others
of us have multiple clients, typically each for a few days a
month or less.  To complicate things further, some of us have
even have had retainer arrangements in which a client may not
call for months and situations where we are engaged by two
separate, competing, companies (disclosed to each and for
different purposes and tasks).  In addition, there are some
types of consulting agreements on which NDAs are not unusual.
If, for example, I were doing some work for a survey research
company who did not want that relationship disclosed (I am not
at present, but have in the past), I would be able to tell the
Nomcom volunteer selection process that I am not doing work for
any company in the Internet business.  I could even tell them
that I'm not working for specific company X or anyone I know to
be one of its competitors.   But I would not be able to identify
that affiliation.  

For those multi-client consultants "affiliation" may be
extremely hard to sort out if, even, the IETF is allowed to know.

How far down that slippery slope do we want to go in the
direction of excluding people from the Nomcom whose income is
not based on traditional, single-company, full time, salaried
employment? I vaguely remember one suggestion that, if a
consulting had any clients at all whose identities could not be
made public, that person should be excluded from the Nomcom
pool.  But, if we go that far, there is no longer any
possibility of the Nomcom representing a reasonable
cross-section of the community.

As a further complication, I don't believe I've seen any real
discussion of whether employees or consultants to the LLC should
be allowed on, or excluded from, the Nomcom.

> Note
> that I don't really view this as major issue -- if we end up
> in a scenario where people are gaming this, then we've already
> lost.

Turned around a bit, I think that is the crux of the problem.
If we have enough safeguards (and confidence in the integrity of
IETF participants and the people who pay them or cover all or
part of their expenses for participation), then some of the
details in the document fall close to making us feel good
because there is something that looks like an explicit
provision.   If we don't, maybe we should be describing
inappropriate behavior by examples and/or ask Nomcom members to
explicit affirm that they do not have problem affiliations and
that they will immediately disclose the fact and resign if
anyone in a position to influence them attempts to do so where
specific candidates are concerned.  Or we can continue down the
present path but if going very far in that direction (or needing
to) indicates that we have already lost... well, what's the
point?  And, if we know the document is, beyond some point,
really establishing principles and norms rather than rules we
are confident would work, wouldn't it be desirable to say that?

thanks,
   john