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

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

Hi John,

I note that I am posting as an individual, and certainly not in any
capacity on behalf of the Internet Society, but that my thoughts below
are informed by my experience.

On Thu, Apr 25, 2019 at 01:24:11PM -0400, John C Klensin wrote:

> It seems to me that, unless you (or others) are ready to claim
> that all of the documents listed above other than 3777 are not
> legitimate, arguing that this I-D must go through a WG and WG
> Last Call (with or without a BOF) prior to IETF Last Call as a
> matter of our normal procedure with no other path permitted, is,
> to use your term, "strange".   There is, of course, an IETF Last
> Call and IETF review inherent in the AD-sponsored Individual
> Submission process: no one has proposed to eliminate or bypass
> either of those steps.

My concern about this document is rather different.  It lays out a
bunch of reasons to make adjustments, and does not in fact address
most of those reasons.  The main thing it does is make the procedure
easier to start, but it also doesn't adjust the procedure at all.

The procedure, however, is not itself inexpensive, it entails a degree
of collegial damage to the organization that ought to be taken quite
seriously, and it does not have a lot of clean exit procedures (so,
for instance, the procedure can't AFAICT be called off once it has
been initiated, if the petitioners pull out).  It seems to me to be
worth some pretty careful, even-tempered discussion. Perhaps the
procedure as designed is so designed because of an implicit
understanding that it would be somewhat hard to inititate.  Perhaps it
was designed in a cultural context of much greater social cohesion and
cultural homogeneity of the IETF than may be the case today.  The
present age is fractious and divided everywhere, and the IETF does not
appear, to me, to be resisting that zeitgeist.

Speaking selfishly, the procedure also imposes a burden on the
Internet Society President to find and appoint a Recall Committee
Chair.  As the incumbent who'd have to do that, my first problem is to
write a job description, then to find a suitable candidate who has the
time and motivation and reputation to do this.  Making this burden
easier to impose on me at surprising intervals is something that,
quite frankly, I would be inclined to resist were someone to ask me in
my professional capacity what I thought.  That suggests to me that the
procedure would need some additional modifications in order to make
the changes practical, and once the worm-can is open who knows what
additional red wrigglers will start moving around?

I just don't see how to treat this change as "fine tuning".  It's an
effort to make a nuclear option easier to use, and I do not understand
how that could be understood as anything other than a fundamental,
community-altering decision.  That kind of decision seems to me to
warrant the use of every mechanism one has to ensure one proceeds
with the right care.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[e-mail]