Re: [Iasa20] draft-haberman-iasa20dt-recs-00.txt

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

Dear colleagues,

I'm unlikely to be in the IASA 2.0 BoF today.  I've read the draft and
I have some remarks. 

I want to thank the DT for their work and for getting this together so
quickly.  

On Fri, Jul 07, 2017 at 04:29:53PM +0000, Joseph Lorenzo Hall wrote:

> Feedback on the set of identified possible paths forward or options is the key
> question. Are any potential missed options? Also, feedback on the implications
> of options being considered would be welcome.

I think that the possible options, to a first order of approximation,
are right, but I fear that the trade-off discussion is a little too
flat.  In particular, I fear that the analysis does not place enough
emphasis on the achievability of each potential option, compared to
the advantages that each might bring.  This is in some sense similar
to Bob's worry about financial impact: one might like the advantages
of the most expensive option, but if one doesn't have the money then
one can't have it.  The same is true of time: if the difference in
transition time between two options is measured in years, that seems
like it will be a pretty important factor.  My own sense is that
anything we predict will take more than 18 months is a non-starter,
because of the term length of appointees.

This brings me to a second issue: the document is silent on the term
length of IASA++/board members, but I think that issue has to be faced
squarely.  We have a serious structural problem in that the oversight
function ought to be responsible for longer-term considerations, but
as a practical matter they can't have a horizon of more than 2 or
maybe 3 years because of appointment lengths: nobody who makes a
current plan can say with any assurance that they'll be around when a
plan takes effect.  We already see this problem explicitly in
controversies over meeting site selection, but I think the problem is
a deep one.  If we don't tackle this problem as a first-order one,
we'll miss it in any arrangements that we make.

Finally, and perhaps related to the first issue, I disagree very
strongly with the claim that we should not try to separate the Trust
membership from the IAOC-or-successor membership at the same time we
are making other changes.  On the contrary, I think the linking of the
Trust is a really serious structural problem that could easily hurt
our ability to do something about IASA if we do not plan explicitly to
address it.  The Trust once was responsible only for property that
affected the IETF directly, but that is no longer true.  We need to
avoid creating the conditions under which issues that people have with
the Trust composition constrain our freedom of movement in what we can
do to our administrative support arrangements.  At the same time, the
overloading of the IAOC membership with Trust responsibilities means
that the workload arrangements are quite bad if there is a lot for the
Trust to do; so fixing that overloading ought to be an important goal
in this effort.

I think that the DT draft is a good start, and I look forward to
continued progress.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[e-mail]