Re: letters from Ted & Alissa

[Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]>]

Hiya,

I'm also not speaking for the IAB, as you'll see when I
don't quite agree with Ted:-)

On 03/07/2019 21:12, Ted Hardie wrote:
> As I tried to lay out in the message which started the RSE Model thread, I
> think there is an underlying structural problem in RFC 6635.  It presents
> two different views of the RSE and those views have some inherent
> conflicts.  One of those views is of a senior technical contributor to the
> community who is expected to both manage the evolution of the series and
> represent the value of the RFC series to others.  The other view is of a
> contractor whose role is defined in a set of contracts and extensions and
> who is overseen by a set of unpaid volunteers.  As Mike St. Johns noted,
> being a contractor does not mean being a low-level employee; you can have
> contractors who are subject matter experts and quite well-valued
> contributors to a community effort.  But even for those subject matter
> experts, there are communications which are addressed to them as a
> contractor.

I do think there may be structural problems with how 6635
matches today's reality, but I'm not sure the above is one.
I fully agree with you that those different aspects (editor
vs. contractor, volunteer vs. staff) of the RSE/RSOC
relationship are exactly the kinds of thing that can easily
create tensions and possibilities for mis-communication.
But I'm not convinced that's such a structural problem with
6635.

What seems to me a more structural issue with 6635 is that
it makes the RSE responsible for the performance of the
RPC and I'm not sure if that's still a good plan that has
a good mapping to reality. However, I don't know enough
about the current reality. (So by "not sure" I really do
mean "uncertain," and not that I'm fully convinced of the
opposite thing:-)

I'd be interested in what Heather and others involved have
to say on that topic and more generally on how 6635 maps
to today's reality. (I'd be as interested in that being
discussed here, on rfc-interest, or off-list if that were
needed, though of course noting that I'm asking about
how the RFC matches reality and not about any personnel
matters so hopefully on-list should work for some list.)

Lastly, as Ted said in a different mail, I doubt the
community can sort out such issues before an RSE RFP
process would be done, so if people had opinions on
when, how or if we should engage in topics like that,
it'd be good to hear those opinions.

IOW, while these are important long term RFC series
topics to discuss, it's not clear to me that we could
reach consensus on any resulting changes in time for
them to affect the planned RFP process.

So I'm not sure (same meaning again:-) if we'd be better
to try tackle these issues now while folks are thinking
about the general topic, or later, when it could be done
without the possible time pressure of an RFP process and
hopefully after people's understandable concerns about
the current undesirable situation have been assuaged.

Cheers,
S.