Re: [Gendispatch] some thoughts about ietf communication

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Jul 29, 2021 at 11:15 AM Joel M. Halpern <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> I may be misreading this, but it seems that it misses one important
> purpose for the plenary.
>
> Sometimes, the community has concerns that need to be expressed, whether
> the leadership thinks the issue is important or not.  That is why, even
> though it is usually vacuous, I consider the open mic portion of the
> plenary to be important.
>

Sometimes there are issues that have to be raised in public BECAUSE the
IESG doesn't want to talk about them.

Like that time that the chair of a working group who was also an AD in
another area flagrantly abused their power by refusing to recognize WG
consensus on a draft he personally opposed and filibustered the issue for
over a year by referring it to a cabal for review and nobody on the IESG
dared to acknowledge the situation because the WG chair might retaliate in
IESG.

If the only venue for talking truth to power is the law courts, that is
where it is going to be taken.


Since then, a number of reforms have prevented a repeat. SECDIR and GENART
reviews explicitly state that they are not privileged and should be treated
as other comments. The referral of a WG item to a directorate should never
have been allowed then, it would be much harder to justify today. Another
important reform is that with the exception of GENAREA which is
traditionally chaired by IETF Chair, members of the IESG are not WG chairs.
And there is a general expectation that AD tenure is limited to two terms
with three being exceptional.