Re: I-D Action: draft-hardie-iaoc-iab-update-00.txt

[Dave Crocker <[e-mail]>]

On 2/3/2016 2:33 PM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> I think it is super-important that someone on the IAB is following
> those matters closely.  What is not clear to me is why it needs to be
> the_chair_.


The word "following" is the essential disparity.  It casts the IAB's 
role as basically passive monitoring.  Note, however, that there have 
already been some comments about the need for real-time decision-making. 
  That's not 'following'.

(In case it hasn't been mentioned, this is at least the second time 
there has been an effort to replace the IAB Chair's ex-officio role with 
a surrogate.  Arguably, there have been at least two.  One was de facto, 
with the surrogate having 'guest' role in the IAOC.  The second was an 
actual proposal.)

The current proposal offers odd motivations.  The logic offered in 
Section 3 of the draft mostly reduces to "the IAB chair is busy" and 
"IAB programs have been useful, so let's invoke that model for an 
operational management position"...

One question is, among the range of activities an IAB Chair does, what 
makes IAOC participation sufficiently low priority to warrant handing it 
to someone else?

Worse, the proposal seems to think that an IAB committee doing review is 
somehow equivalent to one, continuing, deeply knowledge person actually 
/participating/ in the IAOC's decision-making.  (That, at least, is what 
Section 2 of the draft opens with, noting the designation of a program 
'lead' as the sitting IAOC member, almost as an after-thought.)


There is an real dilemma here -- and maybe more than one -- and 
resolving it/them requires some care.

The job of overseeing administrative activity for an organization isn't 
all that sexy, but the organization dies if it isn't done properly.  So 
choices for who to have in positions on the committee should attend to 
background and skillset.  This is an operations job and operations is 
different from design or development.

Start with the question:  Why were the IAOC/Trust originally formulated 
with the ex-officio voting members?  I believe the answer is what has 
already been noted in this thread:  each one of those folk carry deep 
context.  Deeper than most surrogates are likely to have. With great 
regularity, IAOC decisions really do require quite a bit of context and 
quite a bit of community-oriented thinking. The I* Chairs aren't the 
only ones embodying those attributes, but they are the only ones 
embodying them reliably.

Then note that having such a high percentage of the IAOC be the 
overloaded ex-officio folk means that there are precious few 
alternatives for IAOC chair or IETF Trust chair, or for leading 
IAOC-based activities.

My suggestion a few years back, after being on the IAOC for awhile, was 
to keep the ex-officio folk on tap, for their knowledge, but move them 
to non-voting positions, and then specify 3 other folk to do the voting. 
(I think this matches St. John's current suggestion.)  In effect, that's 
a superset of what's being put forward here, but then it's trying to 
respond to multiple issues.  My proposal was dismissed as resulting in 
too many people on the IAOC/Trust. After repeatedly watching the 
challenge of getting candidates for IAOC and Trust chairs and for active 
IAOC member participation in efforts, I'll offer that it's better to 
have a reasonable-sized pool of active participants.

(As for the draft's form:  An effort to make changes here should 
certainly separate the process of populating the IAOC from any internal 
steps taken within any of the bodies feeding bodies to the IAOC.)



On 2/2/2016 6:30 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> I think the IETF Chair slot is a different matter. Yes, the IETF
> Chair is also the IESG Chair, but I don't believe s/he is in the IAOC
> on behalf of the IESG.

The concept that any voting member of the IAOC is 'representing' anyone 
other than the entire IETF strikes me as odd and during my time on the 
IAOC I don't recall anyone appearing to have a more narrow focus of concern.

> I think the ISOC President slot is also a different matter, and a
> bit tricky. I don't think we can declare our "funding agency" to be
> a non-voting member.

Arguably, they shouldn't be voting members, but then neither should 
anyone on staff.  In both cases, having a vote invites potential 
conflict of interest situations.  (Reminder:  CoI is about the 
/potential/ for conflict in goals from the organizational positions; 
it's not about specific people.)

And just to offer some variety: the ISOC and staff representatives often 
are the only ones with much direct management experience...

d/