IAOC being effective (Was: Re: I-D Action: draft-hardie-iaoc-iab-update-00.txt)

[Jari Arkko <[e-mail]>]

John,

> I'm much more interested in the
> question of whether the IAOC is being effective today and how we
> can make it more so than I am in how the IAB organizes itself.
> In part because of the worked example I cited earlier (and some
> others), I don't see the IAOC as working well.   I'd be happy to
> be contradicted but, from the outside, it looks as if part of
> the problem is too large a percentage of the membership being
> stretched too thin.

I’ve been thinking about this topic recently :-)

And it certainly is worthwhile to consider evaluating how well our arrangements work.

There are many things to think about, of course. In my mind relaxing the rules on which IAB person should be involved is a good thing but it is a small thing.

There’s the way we make decisions and the teams who are involved in that. I’m personally not a big fan of the magic knowledge through the all-knowing IAOC model; I think it is more about us having the appropriate teams (subcommittees in IAOC terminology) be the experts and make the proposed decisions, and the IAOC’s role is due diligence, to confirm those decisions, and to oversee that those teams and our staff are working well.

There are other organisational questions. But those are not the only ones, one could ask about resources as well. I can observe a long-term trend where the official IETF services grow (volunteer things move to commercial platform or new services are needed). I can also observe a short-term trend where the workload has increased due to various one-off situations, such as the new RFC format tools work, IANA transition, starting up the hackathon series, training for the ombudsteam, people changes in sponsorship arrangements at ISOC, and so on.

Jari