Re: [Iasa20] Barry Leiba's Discuss on draft-ietf-iasa2-rfc4071bis-08: (with DISCUSS and COMMENT)

[Barry Leiba <[e-mail]>]

Lots of other discussion, but let's focus on the meat of it:

> I believe Barry's DISCUSS was "was this choice made deliberately?" and the answer to
> that is clear: yes.  We could take this as a signal to re-litigate it, but that is not the point
> of the IESG review and would not be an appropriate reaction to this DISCUSS.

Quite.  Yes, what makes this a DISCUSS is that I want to have a
discussion about whether the working group considered the issues.
You're quite correct that simply relitigating it would be
inappropriate.

What you're missing, perhaps, is that I'm not asking if the working
group really discussed the desired term; I'm quite sure they did.  I'm
asking if they properly considered the consequences of that decision
on the IESG's ability to practically select someone other than the
IETF Chair.

First, while it's been mentioned in the discussion that we could have
a non-AD in that position, I'll remind everyone that the document
explicitly says "exceptionally".  We don't know exactly what that
means, but I interpret it as an admonishment not to make it a routine
thing.

In practical terms, that means that half the ADs are at best
questionably eligible and, depending upon interpretation, not
practically eligible at all.  And they never will be, because they'll
always be "off cycle".  This really pushed the IESG to appoint someone
who has the same AD cycle as the IETF Chair, and to rule out the other
seven.  Was this considered?

But suppose we should choose to appoint a first-term AD in the middle
of her term, figuring that she'll likely get a second term and that we
can invoke "exceptionally" if she doesn't.  Might that affect NomCom's
decision next year?  Did anyone think about that effect?

Suppose someone wanted to stand for an AD position and specifically
hoped to get the IESG's LLC appointment.  Perhaps she would choose NOT
to stand next year because it will be off cycle and she'd be unlikely
to get the appointment.  That has an effect on who puts their names in
for AD positions.  Did the working group discuss that?

It doesn't take too long to come up with a number of situations that
the two-year term for the IESG appointment raises, if the IESG decides
to appoint someone other than the chair... and, again, I think it's
*very* important that we have the ability to assign tasks such as this
to other than the IETF Chair, so I think that part of the working
group's decision was well founded.

As to Alissa's point about running a selection process, I'll note that
the IESG itself can control that by explicitly appointing someone for
two years -- essentially giving two one-year terms in the appointment.
But that lets us control it.

I appreciate that changing board members too often is bad.  I do not
think that having one board member *potentially* change every year is
not that bad -- and language can be there encouraging continuity and
discouraging frequent replacement for no good reason.  And I think the
benefits to opening up the IESG's choice outweighs the down side.

But what I'm aiming at in the discussion is whether the working group
considered that explicitly: were the issues that this raises for the
IESG's decision process and practical ability to fill the position
adequately considered and discussed.  I'm not sure they were.

Barry

On Mon, Apr 8, 2019 at 1:02 PM Ted Hardie <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Apr 8, 2019 at 9:51 AM Russ Housley <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> Speaking personally, I believe consideration to this point was given.  See the threads leading up to Jason's message with the title "Consensus on Director Sources and Number"  August 1, 2018.
>>
>>
>> I agree that this was discussed, but I can see that a one-year term for the IESG appointment would work better with the way that the IESG assigns various people to jobs.  That gets revisited every March.  So, if we really want the IESG to be able to pick someone other than the IETF Chair, the one-year term does seem to be a better fit.
>>
> But shifting that often would be terrible for the Board.  As it stands, there's a lot of context in all of this and that amount of transition is just bad for forward progress.  Since this appointee has to act on behalf of the whole organization (as all board members do), having them have less context than the other members is already bad; shifting to one year would make it potentially much worse.  I think that would make this much closer to a liaison role, with all the issues that entails.
>
> I believe Barry's DISCUSS was "was this choice made deliberately?" and the answer to that is clear: yes.  We could take this as a signal to re-litigate it, but that is not the point of the IESG review and would not be an appropriate reaction to this DISCUSS.  That would, in fact, shift it over the line in the DISCUSS criteria document to DISCUSS non-criteria:
>
> Disagreement with informed WG decisions that do not exhibit problems outlined in Section 3.1 (DISCUSS Criteria). In other words, disagreement in preferences among technically sound approaches.
>
> regards,
>
> Ted
>
>