Re: Dispute process (Was: Resignation request)

[Nico Williams <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 03:07:53PM -0400, Paul Wouters wrote:
> On Mar 10, 2020, at 14:45, Nico Williams <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > What I've encountered is that at the limit you have to appeal or give
> > up, and how well things go before you get to that stage depends on how
> > willing WG chairs and responsible AD are to actively mediate dispute
> > resolution.
> > 
> > The case I felt went really badly was the TLS DNSSEC extension.  
> 
> I agree and while that case was bad, what’s worse is that no
> post-mortem was done here. I don’t think the IETF as an organization
> will take any lesson from this, and that in itself makes it likely the
> same mistakes will be made again.

+1.

Perhaps we need a procedure for lodging complaints that aren't appeals,
and which result in a review and report.

> > So there was no question of appeal, really.  
> 
> I think also because in the appeal some of the same actors would appear. 

The whole point of an appeal is to get the IETF chair, or the IAB, to
step in.  The route to appeal was mooted by the WG's choice to abandon
the work item.

(A cynic might wonder if that choice was not purposeful, precisely to
allow the original work to continue unimpeded [perhaps] on the ISE track
with an appeal mooted.  I do not believe that was the case.)

> > Not sure how to make it better, except maybe thus: it should be possible
> > to get a review of how a dispute was resolved not so much as an appeal,
> > but as a way to remediate problems to help alleviate _next_ dispute.
> 
> Going back to this thread, when I read the subject of resignation and
> the first email, it seemed like I just stumbled across a hallway fight
> - people that demand unreasonable things. I don’t know how this
> conflict went from nothing to asking for someone’s resignation but
> clearly more people should have been involved earlier to de-escalate
> this. maybe that was tried and just not visible here? It would be good
> if there had been some kind of log that could have been referenced so
> we could determine why this failed to de-escalate.

+1

I wouldn't want to drag the ombudsman into this, but maybe that's the
next best step.

Nico
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