Re: To "lose the argument in the WG"

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On Feb 18, 2017, at 7:41 PM, Ted Lemon <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> This is technically true, but it's worth pointing out that working group charters are approved first by the IETF, and only _then_ by the IESG.   If the IESG decides that the working group charter is much broader than the IETF agreed it is, then that is a process failure. 
> 
> In practice the IETF often leaves these issues entirely to the IESG, so in practice this isn't necessarily a problem, but in principle it is, and you can't know whether the IETF said nothing about a charter because we agreed with the scope, or because we didn't look at it; in the former case, the IETF actually does have a position on the scope of the charter—it's just unstated, because it agrees with what was proposed.   Going beyond that scope would definitely be a process failure.

Joel Halpern pointed out privately that I somewhat misrepresented the process here.   The IETF review process for working group charters does not require that there be IETF consensus to approve the charter.    This is true, butdoesn't actually refute my claim that it is a process failure if the IESG approves a charter and then allows a working group to do work that exceeds the bounds of the charter.   That _is_ a process failure, in the simple literal sense that the process did not produce the right outcome: the IETF community was not given an opportunity to review the charter that would have included the work that was done.   If we think that's okay, why do we have working group charters at all?

The way the process _should_ have gone in this case is that when the IESG noticed that new work needed to be done by a particular working group, they updated the charter to reflect that, and got IETF review of the updated charter.   In this case, you are right that if the IETF community was clearly opposed to the new work, the IESG could still approve the charter.   But this would be extraordinary.

And this is why the IETF community shouldn't treat charter updates as pro forma.   Charter review is an important part of the feedback mechanism that keeps the IETF a consensus-driven organization.   Doing out-of-charter work, or lawyering the charter to say that work that really isn't part of the intent of the charter nevertheless conforms to the letter of the charter, bypasses this important step.