Re: Options for IETF administrative restructuring

Leslie and Harald,

I would like to make one suggestion about this process.  For 
suggestions about substance, I will, of course, wait for the 
final -00 version of the draft.   This note is deliberately 
being sent before I have done so because I don't want my remarks 
to be biased by how I feel about its specific content.

There was considerable confusion in San Diego, and earlier, 
induced by large numbers of sub-discussions, with different, 
sometimes designated, groups of people holding discussions and 
not having access to each other's comments.  Harald responded to 
comments about this during the plenary by indicating that, once 
the draft was posted, everything would be public.

So I would like to suggest that any discussions within or among 
the IAB and IESG, or subsets of them, or between them and other 
groups, take place on mailing lists whose archives are public 
and/or which can be subscribed to (even if only on a read-only 
basis) by interested members of the community.

The key strategic decisions here (as distinct from the fine 
details) have to be made with the informed consent of the IETF 
community.   To me, that implies that all of the options and 
their pros and cons have to be on the table: after the fact, 
there should not be even a suspicion that the choice was 
influenced by discussions of only a reduced set of options.

I note in particular that your first "next step" reads "Have a 
public discussion on the IETF list on the options presented in 
the draft".   I think that is exactly correct iff the community 
is reasonably assured that _all_ of the plausible options have 
been identified, and fairly described, in the draft.  I hope and 
trust that is the case, but any suspicions, engendered by 
private discussion, that some options have been excluded from 
discussion by excluding them from the draft, would be extremely 
harmful and should be avoided.

As you said, we need to take the time to get this right.  We 
also need to be sure that the community emerges from the process 
confident that all of the options have been fairly considered in 
the process of selecting the right one.

thanks,
    john

--On Thursday, August 26, 2004 11:16 AM -0400 Leslie Daigle 
<leslie@thinkingcat.com> wrote:

> [This is a re-send of a message I sent last night; that
> message is
>...

> Hello, IETF community.
>
> Attached is the document we promised you in San Diego - a
> report from
> our consultant, Carl Malamud, which lays out a series of
> options and
> recommendations for moving forward with the IETF administrative
> restructuring process, according to the recommendations laid
> out in RFC3716 (the Advisory Committee report).  It has been
> submitted to the Internet Drafts repository and should be >...

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