Re: [Gendispatch] WG Review: General Area Dispatch (gendispatch)

Hi Ben,

> On Oct 10, 2019, at 5:52 PM, Ben Campbell <ben@nostrum.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On Oct 10, 2019, at 12:21 AM, John C Klensin <john-ietf@jck.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> --On Tuesday, October 8, 2019 21:18 +0200 Barry Leiba
>> <barryleiba@computer.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> ...
>>>> Another difference is that while DISPATCH is mainly
>>>> interesting to people in the ART Area, we can expect
>>>> GENDISPATCH to draw from all areas. We try not to let
>>>> DISPATCH conflict with other ART meetings. How do you
>>>> deconflict GENDISPATCH without it turning into another plenary
>>>> or a standing BoF?
>>> 
>>> This is always an issue with Gen Area BoFs and WGs, and this
>>> will be no different.  I think the bottom line is that
>>> there'll be a set of people who will want to participate
>>> regularly, and we'll try to accommodate that... there'll be
>>> people who want to parachute in for certain topics, and we'll
>>> do what we can to accommodate that, realizing that it's
>>> harder... and there'll be a lot of people who won't want to
>>> have anything to do with it until a proposal is at a stage
>>> where they strongly support it or object to it, and there's
>>> little we can do to accommodate that.  It is what it is, but
>>> it's no different than if we just charter Gen Area WGs without
>>> a DISPATCH-like start.  No?
>> 
>> Barry,
>> 
>> I see one risk with this that I think should be considered and
>> watched for even if the IESG decides to move forward.
>> 
>> The IETF has a rather long and difficult history, with only a
>> few exceptions since the POISED and POISSON WGs, of there being
>> two types of process change proposals.  One type is
>> enthusiastically welcomed by the IESG.  A large fraction  of
>> proposals of that type originated within the IESG (or
>> occasionally the IAB) and were pushed at the community rather
>> than being in any sense bottom-up.  That is not necessarily bad
>> -- your work (and Thomas's and Harald's) on IANA Considerations
>> is, IMO, one of the more positive examples.   Others are not.
>> They, and especially ones that members of the IESG see as a
>> threat to their authority or the way they do things and
>> sometimes as adding work, have tended to vanish.  Often they
>> vanish without a trace, with no opportunity for the community to
>> take positions on Last Call, sometimes inconsistent with WG
>> consensus, and usually with very little accountability for
>> individual ADs or the IESG in general.  I (and some others)
>> routinely cite NEWTRK as an example but there are others.  In
>> many of them, the IESG has insisted that a working group is
>> needed and then refused to create such a working group (or has
>> created one with a charter so narrow or broad as to make
>> progress impossible) as a means of killing the effort.  In
>> others, ADs have managed to erect sufficient obstacles and
>> induce enough delays that people simply lose interest.
>> Sometimes that is A Good Thing; often it is a control mechanism
>> that keep particular people or points of view in power and
>> prevent the IETF from evolving and making progress.
>> 
>> So, the question about this proposed WG for me is whether it
>> will make those tendencies better and thereby prevent good ideas
>> from getting lost or suppressed.   If so, I think it is a great
>> idea.   But I also see the risk of its being used to bury work
>> that it out of favor with "the leadership" and doing so in a way
>> that preserves the status quo except when the IESG wishes things
>> to be different) and enables even less transparency and
>> accountability than we have seen in the past.  I'd like to see
>> ideas and controls about how to prevent the latter or how to
>> detect it and push back if it starts to occur, and I don't see
>> those in the current draft specification.
> 
> Hi John,
> 
> This brings up another question in my mind. The ART ADs typically treat DISPATCH decisions as non-binding recommendations. Likewise, the ADs may skip DISPATCH and take proposals straight to BoF or even WG formation if they think it appropriate.
> 
> Would GENDISPATCH decisions be treated the same, or would they be binding on the IESG? I had assumed the former, in the sense that AD discretion applies to pretty much any working group. Whichever case is the answer, I think the charter needs to be explicit about it.

I changed the sentence about RFC 3710 so it now includes the word “discretion.” https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-gendispatch/

Best,
Alissa

> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Ben.
> 
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