Re: WG Review: General Area Dispatch (gendispatch)

[Mirja Kuehlewind <[e-mail]>]

Hi John,

Top-posting because I would like to make a meta comment on the text you wrote below. You seem to base our statements on an assumption that, excessively formulated,  IESG members in general act in bad faith and are mostly driven by the selfish interest of retaining their power. To be honest I’m not entirely sure which power you exactly talk about but in my case I’m more than happy to release any power I may or may not have in March after spending large portions of my time and work power on my AD tasks the last 3.5 years and simply have time to use my energy for something else again.

Still it makes me sad to see that members of the community make these kind of very general, negative assumptions about a rather diverse group of others members of our community that have been (re-)selected by the community because, as I thought, the community trusts them to fill the respective position appropriately and act in a good faith. 

I'm pretty sure I also have been “delaying” things during my AD terms, either because I actually really just didn’t have time or because I wasn’t able to figure out if there is community interest or consensus in doing the work. I never took any action with the goal to "prevent the IETF from evolving and making progress”. And, call me naive, but I don’t even understand why I should have an interest in doing so.

Again, I’m just writing this email because reading you mail below does makes me sad and I’m also afraid that this kind of views about then IESG could actually stop other members of the our community to volunteer for a position on the IESG in future.

Mirja




> On 10. Oct 2019, at 07:21, John C Klensin <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> --On Tuesday, October 8, 2019 21:18 +0200 Barry Leiba
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>> ...
>>> Another difference is that while DISPATCH is mainly
>>> interesting to people in the ART Area, we can expect
>>> GENDISPATCH to draw from all areas. We try not to let
>>> DISPATCH conflict with other ART meetings. How do you
>>> deconflict GENDISPATCH without it turning into another plenary
>>> or a standing BoF?
>> 
>> This is always an issue with Gen Area BoFs and WGs, and this
>> will be no different.  I think the bottom line is that
>> there'll be a set of people who will want to participate
>> regularly, and we'll try to accommodate that... there'll be
>> people who want to parachute in for certain topics, and we'll
>> do what we can to accommodate that, realizing that it's
>> harder... and there'll be a lot of people who won't want to
>> have anything to do with it until a proposal is at a stage
>> where they strongly support it or object to it, and there's
>> little we can do to accommodate that.  It is what it is, but
>> it's no different than if we just charter Gen Area WGs without
>> a DISPATCH-like start.  No?
> 
> Barry,
> 
> I see one risk with this that I think should be considered and
> watched for even if the IESG decides to move forward.
> 
> The IETF has a rather long and difficult history, with only a
> few exceptions since the POISED and POISSON WGs, of there being
> two types of process change proposals.  One type is
> enthusiastically welcomed by the IESG.  A large fraction  of
> proposals of that type originated within the IESG (or
> occasionally the IAB) and were pushed at the community rather
> than being in any sense bottom-up.  That is not necessarily bad
> -- your work (and Thomas's and Harald's) on IANA Considerations
> is, IMO, one of the more positive examples.   Others are not.
> They, and especially ones that members of the IESG see as a
> threat to their authority or the way they do things and
> sometimes as adding work, have tended to vanish.  Often they
> vanish without a trace, with no opportunity for the community to
> take positions on Last Call, sometimes inconsistent with WG
> consensus, and usually with very little accountability for
> individual ADs or the IESG in general.  I (and some others)
> routinely cite NEWTRK as an example but there are others.  In
> many of them, the IESG has insisted that a working group is
> needed and then refused to create such a working group (or has
> created one with a charter so narrow or broad as to make
> progress impossible) as a means of killing the effort.  In
> others, ADs have managed to erect sufficient obstacles and
> induce enough delays that people simply lose interest.
> Sometimes that is A Good Thing; often it is a control mechanism
> that keep particular people or points of view in power and
> prevent the IETF from evolving and making progress.
> 
> So, the question about this proposed WG for me is whether it
> will make those tendencies better and thereby prevent good ideas
> from getting lost or suppressed.   If so, I think it is a great
> idea.   But I also see the risk of its being used to bury work
> that it out of favor with "the leadership" and doing so in a way
> that preserves the status quo except when the IESG wishes things
> to be different) and enables even less transparency and
> accountability than we have seen in the past.  I'd like to see
> ideas and controls about how to prevent the latter or how to
> detect it and push back if it starts to occur, and I don't see
> those in the current draft specification.
> 
> best,
>     john
> 
>