Re: Appeal against IESG blocking DISCUSS on draft-klensin-rfc2821bis

[Robert Elz <[e-mail]>]

    Date:        Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:32:59 +0200
    From:        Eliot Lear <[e-mail]>
    Message-ID:  <[e-mail]>

  | Isn't the IESG is meant to serve two roles?

Yes, but not the two you enumerated.   The first, and far and away
most important, is to cause the work to get done - to coordinate the
working groups, help keep out (unwanted) duplicated effort, and somehow
try to cajole people into actually getting things done (etc.)

The second ...

  | The first is to be the arbiter of community consensus.

is that one - which really ought to be done by something different, as
asking #1 to do the work, then #2 to judge if the work is done correctly
really is a conflict of interest.   But that's not germane to any
current discussion.

  | The second is to be a judge on the 
  | quality of the work before them, as to whether it is ready to move 
  | forward.

In the sense of whether the WG has reached consensus, yes, but that's
all a part of #1.

In the sense you mean it, no, that's the job of the whole community.

Of course, the IESG members are a part of the community, and are just
as entitled to an opinion as anyone else.   Their opinions also carry
the same weight as anyone else's (or anyone else with similar reputation
and experience anyway - there's no expectation that necessarily everyone's
ability is equal).

  | I don't want the IESG to author the docs like Jon did but I do
  | want them to stand in the way of dumb ideas.

I don't, I want the community as a whole to do that.   It is just fine for
an IESG member (or anyone else) to point out that they think a proposal is
deficient in some way, but then the community get to judge whether it
should go forward anyway (whether the objection matters).

The IESG do get to judge the community's opinion (figure out what we're all
saying), but when doing that, they need to do so absent any personal
biases one way or the other.

It always appeals to have someone else we can blame when dumb things happen,
"anyone but me", but that's unreasonable.   If poor ideas become codified,
its our fault, not the IESGs, nor is it their responsibility to prevent it.

kre

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