Re: AD Sponsorship of draft-moonesamy-recall-rev

['Andrew Sullivan' <[e-mail]>]

Hi Adrian,

Thanks for your detailed reply.  In an effort to follow the apparent
desires of the IETF, I've set Reply-To on this message to the Other
List :)  Whether it will make the list manager header munging I dunno.

Again, I represent no voice but my own.

On Fri, Apr 26, 2019 at 09:10:15PM +0100, Adrian Farrel wrote:

> Well, doesn't the draft offer three areas of concern, and address them with
> specific proposed changes:
> - Eligibility of IAB and IESG members and other Nomcom appointees

It simply deletes this consideration, yet it quite explicitly notes
how unseemly it is that an appointing nomcom member could participate.
So it doesn't address the issue it raises.

> - Eligibility of remote participants

Only sort of.  It allows registered remote participants to count
(good) but then sets up a rule in which people "have participated
physically or remotely" without defining that term.  If ever there
were an opportunity for confusion and arguments over what constitutes
"participation", I'd like to hope that its first official duty would
not be in determining how we pick everyone else to manage the
organization.  The existing arrangement is quite clear: you register
for and attend the meetings.  The new proposal adds a notion of
participation that is at least in serious need of unpacking. 

> > The main thing it does is make the procedure
> > easier to start, but it also doesn't adjust the procedure at all.
> 
> I think that questioning the first of these has an interesting oppositional
> view: do you propose making it *harder* to start the procedure? Perhaps we
> could say all signatories must have first names starting with the letter A
> :-)

I think this is a false alternative: it simply doesn't admit of the
possibility that the _status quo_ is ok.  In any case, no, I do not
propose making it harder.  What I oppose is making it easier without
thinking about the procedure itself.

> But seriously, what in the last n years suggests that starting the
> procedure has been "easy enough"? Have we already been overrun with recall
> petitions?

This puts the burden of proof entirely in the wrong place.  In order
to show that you need a threshold change, you'd need an argument that
there was a case that should have caused a recall, but that didn't
because the threshold couldn't be met.  To show _that_, you'd at least
need a definition of "should have caused a recall" that was
uncontroversial.  None of that argumentation has been made.  Without
it, I don't understand why anyone argues for a change in the required
number.

In other words, we have no evidence whether the procedure is "easy
enough", but we have exactly the same evidence that it is hard enough
or too hard.  It seems to me that most of the IETF wants to get their
work done, and that they'll do that under many circumstances until the
structure is manifestly unfit for purpose, at which point finding 20
people ought to be a trivial hurdle to clear.

This is also completely unrelated to the question of equity for remote
participants, which AIUI is what got all this going.  

> That is true. And it must be weighed against the damage caused by an
> unaddressed need for a recall.
> We actually don't have any evidence on either side of this issue and so must
> aim to strike a balance letting it be "reasonably" possible to start a
> recall process

I am not sure what to make of a defence of a change in the rules that
starts with the proposition that there is no evidence for any of it.
I will certainly grant the proposition that there is evidence neither
of a need to change nor of adequacy of the current arrangement.  

> We have no knowledge of how this works. But if I was on a recall committee
> and the petitioners sent me mail to say that they had changed their mind, I
> might talk to them and possibly conclude that the petition can be deemed to
> have failed.

You might do anything at all, of course, and another person might do
something else yet again.  The point is that good organizational
procedures intended to be triggered frequently ought to be well
understood.  The current draft proposes that 10 random people who sign
up for free remote participation 3 times and "participate" in some
unspecified way can hold the entire IETF so-called "leadership" to
ransom, and we have no idea how those demands would be processed.  It
seems like the sort of decision that requires careful community
deliberation.  I don't see that this document has reached that
threshold.

> I tend to believe that resistance to fractiousness is best achieved by open
> accountability.

And yet, here we are.  We have an organization that by any measure is,
compared to just about anything I can name, super open and
accountable.  Yet it appears to be beset by fractiousness.  One might
be forgiven for thinking that the effort to lower the threshold for
recall signatures is an effort that will aid that fractiousness.

> For the other points we could consult some people a little older than us.
> Was it an abundance of caution or a deliberate attempt to make it "too hard
> to execute"?

Experience by scholars of history suggests that asking people who did
a thing why they did it will quite often (but unpredictably) yield
justifications that were not made explicit (or were even contradicted)
at the time the thing happened.  We cannot invite the testimony of
those who were there; we can invite only the testimony of those who
remember being one of the people there.  Memory is imperfect.

> But, assume there is a real need for a recall: in that case, I guess you
> would be more than pleased to appoint a recall committee chair.

No, but I would do my duty.

It is a _lot of work_ to find a nomcom chair.  I have to canvass a lot
of people.  I have to describe what I'm looking for.  And I have to
use such reputation as I have to cajole people into accepting.

A recall chair would be more contentious without the upside of the
nomcom chair (e.g. that one appointed the right person).  So it is not
clear to me how easy it will be to fill this position, and that seems
like something we ought to take into account if we are going to make
it easier to trigger this procedure both by increasing the class of
people who can participate in the triggering and by lowering the
numbers needed.

> And, since there is a potential for a recall petition at any time

Sure.  My very point was that the draft made that situation easier to
happen without evidence about why such a change ought to happen.

> Do you have some suggestions for a vermicide? 

No, but it seems to me that this is a good example of why a WG needs
to work on this.

> I think applying "the right care" is absolutely spot on.

I'm glad we're in agreement.

> I disagree with you about a recall petition being a nuclear option.

Lots of people do.  But a one-step procedure that moves from "20
people support this" to "committee decides to fire or not" without
intermediate steps is the sort of thing that works well when there are
lots of informal, functioning ways for people to come to agreement.
The excitement among some to reduce the threshold of signatures needed
to invoke this procedure suggests to me that the informal, functioning
ways may be fraying under current community strain.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[e-mail]