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

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Wednesday, February 03, 2016 08:19 +1300 Brian E Carpenter
<[e-mail]> wrote:

>...
> About (1), I think we should hear the pros and cons, because I
> doubt if this proposal arose in a vacuum. In particular, how
> would this help the IAOC be more effective and more responsive
> to community concerns?

I am not on the IAB and have not been privy to the latest round
of discussions, but let me try to answer the question from that
outside perspective and some involvement with an earlier effort
to relax the requirement that the IAB Chair (and, IIR from that
time, the IETF Chair and ISOC President) serve personally on the
IAOC.  

At the time the IASA (and IAOC) were created, there were several
specific reasons to require that the IAB and IETF Chairs and the
ISOC President serve directly on the IAOC, most of them
associated with the transition process from CNRI management and
oversight of the Secretariat function.  You, Brian, know more
about that than most of the community.   At this point, slightly
more than ten years on, the particular set of reasons for the
requirement no longer apply.   Some other things have changed
too (I think more significant than organizational changes in the
IAB).  In particular, some of us believe that the IAOC is not
working very well and that some reforms in the direction of
getting more people on it who have the IAOC among their primary
commitments rather than as a required side-effect of some other
(and very time-consuming) position.  As very recent examples, we
see some of the tangles with Buenos Aires arrangements and the
rather confused first draft of the new Procedures as evidence
that the IAOC (at least as a group) is not paying quite enough
attention to its strategic and management roles.

Ted's note covers the present-day tradeoffs well.  I  think
there are two important reasons for doing this:

(1) If we want an effective and accountable IAOC, we need to
reduce the number of people who have more significant IETF
community commitments somewhere else to a minimum.   That may be
an argument for relaxing the IAOC requirement on the IETF Chair
and ISOC President as well but, of the three, the IAB Chair has
the fewest specific commitments to the community that create
special ties that have to be represented on the IAB and is
probably the most part of a Board-type group that is expected to
function together.

(2) I hope the IAB will always be able to select its Chair as
the member the other members judge to be the best for that job.
If we load the Chair job up with responsibilities that the IAB
cannot rearrange, the choice may have to be strongly conditioned
on the minority of members who can take on all of the extra
work, a situation that, IMO, leads to weakening the IAB and the
job it can do for the community.

By the way and reminded by recent encounters with the IAOC
Procedures, if the community makes the change from "the IAB
Chair serves on the IAOC" to "an IAB member selected by the IAB
serves on the IAOC", the rules about which of the voting members
of the IAOC can serve as IAOC Chair should be reviewed.  I don't
have a strong opinion as to whether a change is appropriate or
not, but there should at least be some discussion and a decision
based on it.

     john