Re: letters from Ted & Alissa

[Nico Williams <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Jul 03, 2019 at 08:30:38PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 03, 2019 at 03:51:10PM -0500, Nico Williams wrote:
> > Sarah Banks wrote a post that explained some of this.  It was enough
> > that I can see how RSOC might *not* have thought that the RSE would take
> > early bidding the way she did.  Perhaps it was all a big failure to
> > communicate rather than RSOC's failure to understand that it was
> > essentially telling the RSE to get lost -- perhaps it was even a failure
> > on the RSE's part rather than RSOC's.
> 
> What I haven't seen for an explanation was why did the rebid *have* to
> happen in 2021.  The answer of "it's was too soon to do it in 2019" is
> the best that we've heard from Sarah.  What I don't understand is why
> couldn't be 2023?  What was so urgent, what was so terribly defective,
> with the reprevious RFP bidding process that we have to do the re-bid
> in 2021 and it couldn't wate for 2023?

Also, if Heather's previous utterances about risk led RSOC to want to
re-bid early, why did RSOC not ask/alert Heather first?

> The only answer when that question was raised, was the following from
> Sarah:
> 
>     I’m trying to understand why the RSOC is being belittled like
>     this. Help me understand. We don’t need an excuse.
> 
> Which to my mind, is non-responsive, if not downright defensive.

Yes.  I understand RSOC members being defensive...  This looks like a
big screwup.  But there's no need.  It happened, now be transparent.

> There also seems to be an strong belief that the RSOC is not obliged
> to tell the community anything: "we don't need an excuse".

Indeed.  Even if that is ostensibly the case, this entire thread shows
it's difficult to hold to that in _actuality_.

RSOC has members, and those members' reputations are on the line.  But
as you say, there can be confidential personnel reasons to keep
personnel decisions private.  If there had been one in this case, then I
would have expected RSOC to keep that confidential.  However, it seems
very much like there was no such reason.

> Perhaps there was some secret personnel reason that couldn't be
> disclosed, and so that might be a reason why some of RSOC's decisions
> have to be shrouded in secrecy.  However, I read Ted Hardie's e-mail
> as saying that he didn't believe that to be the case.

And Sarah's email too.

> In which case, inquiring minds really do want to know --- what was
> causing people to believe this *had* to be done in 2021 versus 2023?
> And how long would the bid process the RSOC was imaging would take?
> Was it such that the RSOC had to make a recommendation in 2019 so that
> the rebid process could be done by 2021?

Sarah's email provided a plausible reason.  I don't understand why that
was not communicated to Heather.

I can still imagine that the problem here was Heather not being given a
reason and her responding as she did when she might have responded
completely differently had she been told.

Bear in mind I'm not fully up to date with this _massive_ thread.  I'm
going to need an index for it...

Nico
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