Re: leader statements

[Suzanne Woolf <[e-mail]>]

On Oct 10, 2013, at 2:30 PM, Melinda Shore <[e-mail]> wrote:

> I really think we need to stop behaving as if the IETF is a
> small group of people who know each other well.  Consensus
> decision-making does not scale well with the number of
> participants, and if we're going to require consensus on
> every leadership decision we're not going to get anything
> done.  Now, being frozen and inactive may be preferable to
> having Jari and Russ go off and make a cooperative public
> statement about internet governance, but it seems to me that
> as long as we have recall and appeals processes we have
> incentives for IETF and IAB chairs, and IESG and IAB members,
> not to go off and do controversial things unilaterally, as
> well as a remedy if they do.

This seems exactly right to me, with the additional observation that even if we're 
insisting that the leadership get consensus on such issues as the Montevideo 
statement, we're still trusting them to find, frame, and bring us the right issues. 

In other words, it's trust all the way down, and if we don't trust the leadership to 
identify relevant issues and address them sanely, obtaining that all-but-impossible 
consensus is just going to leave us with the same problem that people will want
consensus first on what questions are worth addressing and how the consensus 
is to be expressed.

Among other weaknesses, this doesn't seem to be a way to demonstrate to the
interested participant/observer that we know how to manage the challenges of
scaling things.

Suzanne