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

[Eliot Lear <[e-mail]>]

Ted Hardie wrote:
>   	There are very few cases where that is okay.  It applies when
> there is a documented, larger community consensus that the WG or
> submission group decision ignores (a working group decision that
> congestion control wasn't important would get pushback on this
> front, for example).  It applies when the Area Director can demonstrate
> harm to the Internet as a result of the decision; the "can demonstrate"
> there, though, is to the *community* not just to himself or the IESG.
> It applies when the Area Director can demonstrate that the proposal
> simply *does not work* to the satisfaction of the larger community, no
> matter what the proposers believe.
>    

Isn't the IESG is meant to serve two roles?  The first is to be the 
arbiter of community consensus.  The second is to be a judge on the 
quality of the work before them, as to whether it is ready to move 
forward.  The threat of the IESG saying, "jeez what a {dumb|complex|...} 
approach" separates us from other standards organizations (or at least 
it did).  The most famous example of all of this is still the 
ETHERNET-MIB WG where they were upset that Jon Postel reset a counter 
size in the final copy of the MIB to match the IEEE specification, and 
those folks were rip roaring upset that he did so.  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.

In this case they should be there to apply our *evolving* standards.  To 
hogtie those folk to me just begs for others to attempt to make use of 
those knots to get their dumb standards.

Shouldn't the response to John's appeal demonstrate the balance between 
their two roles?

Eliot

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