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

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

Hi Dave,

On Wed, Feb 03, 2016 at 03:53:06PM -0800, Dave Crocker wrote:
> 
> The word "following" is the essential disparity.  It casts the IAB's role as
> basically passive monitoring.  Note, however, that there have already been
> some comments about the need for real-time decision-making.  That's not
> 'following'.

You seem to have elided the very part of my message where I said,
"Certainly, we sometimes need people who, when it is time to make a
decision, are empowered to make that decision and able to rely on the
body that asked them to make such decisions.  But that doesn't need to
be the IAB chair in every case, and this is one where I think we might
get a benefit if we didn't require the chair."  I suppose I could have
used a word other than "following", but the point was that we need
someone who is fully up to speed on things.  That is to say…

> Worse, the proposal seems to think that an IAB committee doing review is
> somehow equivalent to one, continuing, deeply knowledge person actually
> /participating/ in the IAOC's decision-making.

… one, continuing, deeply knowledgeable person.  If it's important to
you to distinguish between "following" and "participating" here, I'm
happy to grant it.  But none of that gets to the problem that is
really bothering me, which is …

> the ex-officio voting members?  I believe the answer is what has already
> been noted in this thread:  each one of those folk carry deep context.
> Deeper than most surrogates are likely to have. With great regularity, IAOC
> decisions really do require quite a bit of context and quite a bit of
> community-oriented thinking. The I* Chairs aren't the only ones embodying
> those attributes, but they are the only ones embodying them reliably.

… this.  I don't think it is healthy, for the IAB or for the
community, that we act as though the way to make this all work well is
to have some _one_ who has all the state.  I think in the case of the
IAB we should distribute the state more widely.  I think it makes for
a more effective and useful body.  It also is a practical effect of
taking seriously our usual claims that we work by consensus, that we
reject kings and presidents, and so on.

As part of that move, we also get the happy benefit that more people
can be considered for IAB chair, because it will entail a smaller time
donation by whoever ends up as the chair.  From the point of view of
organizational diversity, that seems to me to be a significant
advantage too.

> My suggestion a few years back, after being on the IAOC for awhile,
> was to keep the ex-officio folk on tap, for their knowledge, but
> move them to non-voting positions, and then specify 3 other folk to
> do the voting. (I think this matches St. John's current suggestion.)

I also think it matches, but it seems to me that this will either be
ineffective or else it will just add more cooks to the kitchen:

    • If the _ex officio_ people are not really expected to be paying
      attention, then the expertise you are hoping to get won't be
      available: every time you need the supposed special knowledge of
      one of those people, you'll end up having to read them in
      entirely to the issue.  That's no different than having someone
      go back to consult with others on an issue.

    • If the _ex officio_ people are expected to be participating as
      enthusiastically as they are at present (I would like to think
      that I'm holding up my end of the log in the IAOC and Trust, but
      my colleagues there should feel free to correct me), then all we
      get are more committee members.  In my experience, it is a rare
      administrative task that is made either more efficient or better
      delivered by adding more people to the committee.  Perhaps your
      experience differs.

I'm sorry that the draft apparently reads as some sort of complaint
that the IAB chair is too busy to do this.  We'll try to fix that in a
revision.  Now, it's true that there is a time burden; and it's
certainly true this year that, because of events in another
organization, the time commitment has been a little greater than I
(and my employer) had expected.  It's also true that previous IAB
chairs have noted this as a problem.  But it's not the main problem,
in my view.  The main problem is that we think there should be one
person in the middle of all these different things.  It has struck me
more than once that if someone brought us a system with a giant single
state-exchange mechanism in the middle, many of us would immediately
say, "Won't scale, and too brittle and vulnerable."  Yet we seem to
think it a good feature in the organization.  I'm arguing that we can
try another way.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[e-mail]