Re: [Iasa20] 6635bis

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

--On Monday, April 29, 2019 12:10 -0400 Richard Barnes
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> John: I'm confused by this "lean and mean" point.  How is an
> organization with a collection of contractors (RSE, RPC, etc.)
> leaner and meaner than an organization with an equivalent
> number of employees?

I may still not have the right tag line. There may not be one.

However, to try again, I'm more concerned about the management
and between-staff relationships than I am about the
employee-contractor distinctions.  I think the latter are of
little interest as long as the individual is full time but, as
others have pointed out, can get a tad more complicated if they
are not.  Specific cases may differ (see below).   Let's take
the RSE and RPC as examples, with the understanding that other
examples may differ.

RSE: As long as the contracts are written carefully and any
chosen LLC Executive Director's sense of boundaries exceeds that
person's power and control influences, I don't see any
difference between contractor and employee status.   However,
note the qualifications there and the added burdens they may
impose on the LLC Board to exert active oversight and maintain
transparency about boundaries and authority (I don't believe we
did very well about that sort of oversight and transparency with
the IAOC and, while I see encouraging signs, I don't yet see
either structural mechanisms that would better constrain the LLC
Board; YMMD).   So, for example, many of us worked at
universities at one time or another and had both staff/employee
positions with the university and permission to do outside
consulting.  The core relationships were clear: employment was
with the university, primary loyalty was to the university, and
the university had the right (subject to interminable arguments
about academic freedom) to dictate what jobs could or could not
be taken.   The RSE role is different: it is explicitly not
full-time and the RSE appointees are presumably (and I assume
contractually) free to do whatever they like with the rest of
their time, subject only to (I assume) avoidance of significant
conflicts of interest.  Could an employee agreement be designed
to create that same situation?  I'm quite confident that it
could and I'd have no problems with going that way if the LLC
Board and Executive Director decided that was the right thing to
do, subject to the comments below.  I do suggest it would be a
bit harder, if only because such an employee agreement that
doesn't put the employer into a position of being somehow
primary is almost certainly not as common as contractor ones.
I'd also be concerned with another issue that is hinted at
above.  At present, the RSE reports to the IAB (or, as
delegated, the RSOC).  The SOW belongs to the IAB, constrained
for a particular RSE by whatever is covered in the contract (if
that is not consistent with the SOW, the IAB has a problem, but
one that I expect would quickly be sorted out among the parties
involved).  That is unambiguous and, from the standpoint of what
is normally meant by "reporting", I assume the contract is about
how the RSE gets paid rather than about how the RSE is managed.
However, if the RSE is an employee of the LLC, my understanding
of the description of the Executive Director's role in the IETF
Administration LLC agreement is that the RSE then "reports to"
the Exec Dir.  Having two masters (on a day-to-day basis rather
than general oversight of a contract) is rarely a good idea
although I assume that boundaries could be sorted out as long as
everyone involved behaved like an adults with the same goals
(something else I believe can reasonably be assumed).

I don't consider any of the above to be an important issue for
an odd reason: I don't believe anyone who would have the skills
and experience to be qualified to be RSE would accept an
employment agreement that did not spell all of the details out
in great care (or would accept such an agreement at all).   If
the Exec Director and LLC Board decided it was worth the trouble
to work out such agreements with a particular candidate, so be
it.  However, my assumption is that they (and the IAB) would
discover that it severely constrained candidate choices.  And,
of course, if someone were chosen for the RSE role without the
right skills and experience, the problems that would cause would
probably make details of employment or contractor relationship
seem trivial by comparison.

So now let's look at the RPC.  As I understand the current
arrangement, there is a single contract with AMS to perform that
function and the Exec Dir manages that contract while the RSE
has oversight responsibility (and, I assume, high-level task
assignment responsibility) for the specific work being done.  I
assume the IETF LLC does not control (independent of any
informal conversations that might occur) the particular people
who are hired by AMS, their terms of employment, etc.  So,
informal arrangements and discussions aside, neither the RSE nor
the LLC Exec Dir are managing the staff of the RPC on a day to
day basis.  Now, assume things are shifted so that the RPC
function is brought in-house.  First of all, even if the Exec
Dir appoints an RPC manager and delegates as much as possible to
him or her, the Exec Dir is suddenly managing staff, perhaps a
lot of staff.  There is more potential for conflicts between the
Exec Director's role wrt that staff and the RSE's role,
conflicts that are different (not necessarily better one way or
the other) depending on which the RSE is also an LLC employee
nominally reporting to the Exec Dir or a contractor with
performance responsibilities only to the IAB.  There may (or may
not) be an issue with the difference between that role for the
Exec Dir and the role and skills for which the Exec Dir was
chosen.

And, as other people have suggested, I have another
(not-quite-separate) concern should the number of employees of
the LLC exceed some threshold that makes the shape and
responsibilities of the organization a matter that requires
separate consideration.  John Levine wrote in a separate note
"I'd see no more than two employees in the forseeable future,
the exec dir and maybe the RSE".   The threshold at which my
experience suggests that one should become really worried about
what I think Christian referred to as staff capture probably
occurs when the number of employees gets close to or passes the
size of the oversight body, so, modulo the concern above about
the reporting chain for the RSE, that particular two-employee
arrangement wouldn't, by itself, cause me to lose any sleep.  

However, I've also seen a lot of organization mission and
staffing size creep in my time and, as suggested above, I don't
believe the IAOC and IAD set positive records for openness and
transparency and, indeed, sometimes did not live up to the
expectations many or most of us had when the IASA 1.0 model was
adopted.  I don't yet see enough of a positive track record for
the LLC Board and Executive Director to dispel whatever concerns
that history suggests, especially for decisions that enough
personnel matters that the Exec Dir and LLC Board would be
justified in making decisions in secret, negotiating and
executing contracts or employment agreements, and then
announcing the results, even then not providing the community
without any details.   That risk existed with IASA 1.0 and the
IAOC/IAD, but, as the discussion of appeals against Exec Dir or
LLC Board actions made clear, the new arrangements, in practice,
give the community no mechanism for directing the LLC Board if
there is a different of opinion about strategy or holding Board
members accountable except via waiting a long time for a
sufficient set of Nomcom appointments role around or trying to
use an ineffectual recall procedure.

So, if the real issue here is "it should be ok for the Exec Dir
and/or RSE to be employees", let's discuss that and, if there is
rough consensus, write it into an appropriate document.  I
personally see no problem with the first and have outlined some
of the tradeoffs I see (including why I don't expect it to be an
issue) with the second above.   But let's not use phrasing broad
enough to allow the LLC to, e.g., pull the RPC or Secretariat
in-house without coming back to the community and having a
serious discussion.  Maybe we would actually want to do that but
let's not spend a lot of time on it --or open the door to its
being done on a creeping basis and in secret-- until we have a
real example of why it would be good for the community in front
of us.

best,
   john