voting rights in general

[Dave Taht <[e-mail]>]

Forking this conversation a bit.

I know a guy, partially disabled (he sends a lot of time in bed,
reading papers, and writing code), who had to quit attending meetings
3 years ago, for health reasons. He monitors a couple working groups,
still, and he stayed active in one working group, contributing ideas,
testing code. He just helped push 3 of that wg's documents and code to
final adoption (one as "bis") this ietf.

He's a co-author of one RFC, and his work in the IETF is acknowledged
in over a half dozen more, at least one a year for the
last 6+ years.

But he has no voting rights in the ietf, so far as I know, having only
attended virtually.

On Sat, Mar 23, 2019 at 5:41 PM John C Klensin <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> Spencer, Ted,
>
> --On Friday, March 22, 2019 03:51 -0500 Spencer Dawkins at IETF
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> > I'm top posting - how much of this discussion could we
> > short-circuit and conclude by picking a number, and I don't
> > know what number is right, for recall signature eligibility, of
> >
> >    - people who are Nomcom-eligible, or
> >    - would be Nomcom-eligible if we counted registered remote
> > participants    the same way we count on-site participants?
> >...
> > If people have enough skin in the game to have registered for
> > three out of the past five IETF meetings, as wither onsite or
> > remote participants, that's at least a higher bar than me
> > passing out a recall petition for middle school students to
> > sign, the next time I spend the day talking to several hundred
> > middle school students.
> >
> > And if that's not the right proxy for "people who care about
> > the IETF, but don't travel to IETF meetings", what is?
>
> Depending on what we think the problem is that we are trying to
> solve, one could figure out how to titrate the formula a bit,
> e.g., by requiring remote participants to actually log into a WG
> session or two rather than just registering, but yes.  See
> below.   On the other hand, if one is going to go into the sock
> puppet business, the incremental difficulty of setting up twenty
> socket puppets over setting up, say, five, is likely to be small
> indeed.   The benefit also wouldn't come in terms of getting
> someone out of a position because, AFAIK, no one has proposed
> changing the rules for members of an actual recall committee,
> much less the nomcom.  Perhaps those need attention to but the
> key issue at this point is just being able to initiate a recall.
>
>
> > On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 2:07 AM Ted Hardie
> > <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >...
> >> I disagree that it is low.  As written, the bar excludes all
> >> of the people who are currently serving in any
> >> nomcom-appointed role (all of the IESG, IAB, IETF LLC,
> >> Trustees) and requires that the signatories be diverse in
> >> origin:
> >>
> >>        All individual and collective qualifications of
> >>        nominating committee eligibility are applicable,
> >>        including that no more than two signatories may have
> >>        the same primary affiliation.
> >>
> >> These are both trade-offs to avoid factional control, but
> >> they make the effective bar much higher than it would be if
> >> it were just 20 people out of the active IETF population.
> >> Persuading others to put their names out as making the
> >> request has not been shown to work well, even in cases where
> >> the issues were well known.
>
> I think the latter has become more important over time.  It may
> be just me, but, even for the much lighter-weight (and usually
> less personally threatening to specific people in the
> leadership) appeals procedure, I'm hearing a lot more "not worth
> it given the risk of retaliation" comments than I heard a decade
> or so ago.  AFAIK, that is more a change in the participant
> population than an increase in obnoxious behavior by the
> leadership but the effect is the same either way -- raising the
> bar to effective use of either appeals or the recall procedure.
>
> >> I don't necessarily disagree with where the bar is; I've gone
> >> back and forth on that over time and may do so again.  But I
> >> think the evidence is that it is pretty difficult to exercise
> >> and I agree that it is even more difficult for active
> >> contributors who could not themselves sign.
>
> Agreed.
>
> No reason why either of you should remember, but I posted a
> draft to address a subset of these issues somewhat over thirteen
> years ago.  It didn't go anywhere and I never got around posting
> a revision that reflected a few of the comments I got at the
> time.  Mostly because I don't have the time or energy to pursue
> this much further but partially because I'm not confident I have
> the right answers (like Ted, I've gone back and forth about at
> least parts of it), I've handed the source for that draft and a
> few hints over to Subramanian Moonesamy.  I trust he will pursue
> the issue via an I-D, which will at least help focus the
> discussion.  He may list me as co-author because of the original
> draft, but I'm leaving all of the fine-tuning decisions to him
> and, after the draft is posted, to the community.
>
> best,
>     john
>


-- 

Dave Täht
CTO, TekLibre, LLC
http://www.teklibre.com
Tel: [phone]