Re: Recall process

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

Spencer, Ted,

--On Friday, March 22, 2019 03:51 -0500 Spencer Dawkins at IETF
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> I'm top posting - how much of this discussion could we
> short-circuit and conclude by picking a number, and I don't
> know what number is right, for recall signature eligibility, of
> 
>    - people who are Nomcom-eligible, or
>    - would be Nomcom-eligible if we counted registered remote
> participants    the same way we count on-site participants?
>...
> If people have enough skin in the game to have registered for
> three out of the past five IETF meetings, as wither onsite or
> remote participants, that's at least a higher bar than me
> passing out a recall petition for middle school students to
> sign, the next time I spend the day talking to several hundred
> middle school students.
> 
> And if that's not the right proxy for "people who care about
> the IETF, but don't travel to IETF meetings", what is?

Depending on what we think the problem is that we are trying to
solve, one could figure out how to titrate the formula a bit,
e.g., by requiring remote participants to actually log into a WG
session or two rather than just registering, but yes.  See
below.   On the other hand, if one is going to go into the sock
puppet business, the incremental difficulty of setting up twenty
socket puppets over setting up, say, five, is likely to be small
indeed.   The benefit also wouldn't come in terms of getting
someone out of a position because, AFAIK, no one has proposed
changing the rules for members of an actual recall committee,
much less the nomcom.  Perhaps those need attention to but the
key issue at this point is just being able to initiate a recall.


> On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 2:07 AM Ted Hardie
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>...
>> I disagree that it is low.  As written, the bar excludes all
>> of the people who are currently serving in any
>> nomcom-appointed role (all of the IESG, IAB, IETF LLC,
>> Trustees) and requires that the signatories be diverse in
>> origin:
>> 
>>        All individual and collective qualifications of
>>        nominating committee eligibility are applicable,
>>        including that no more than two signatories may have
>>        the same primary affiliation.
>> 
>> These are both trade-offs to avoid factional control, but
>> they make the effective bar much higher than it would be if
>> it were just 20 people out of the active IETF population.
>> Persuading others to put their names out as making the
>> request has not been shown to work well, even in cases where
>> the issues were well known.

I think the latter has become more important over time.  It may
be just me, but, even for the much lighter-weight (and usually
less personally threatening to specific people in the
leadership) appeals procedure, I'm hearing a lot more "not worth
it given the risk of retaliation" comments than I heard a decade
or so ago.  AFAIK, that is more a change in the participant
population than an increase in obnoxious behavior by the
leadership but the effect is the same either way -- raising the
bar to effective use of either appeals or the recall procedure.

>> I don't necessarily disagree with where the bar is; I've gone
>> back and forth on that over time and may do so again.  But I
>> think the evidence is that it is pretty difficult to exercise
>> and I agree that it is even more difficult for active
>> contributors who could not themselves sign.

Agreed.

No reason why either of you should remember, but I posted a
draft to address a subset of these issues somewhat over thirteen
years ago.  It didn't go anywhere and I never got around posting
a revision that reflected a few of the comments I got at the
time.  Mostly because I don't have the time or energy to pursue
this much further but partially because I'm not confident I have
the right answers (like Ted, I've gone back and forth about at
least parts of it), I've handed the source for that draft and a
few hints over to Subramanian Moonesamy.  I trust he will pursue
the issue via an I-D, which will at least help focus the
discussion.  He may list me as co-author because of the original
draft, but I'm leaving all of the fine-tuning decisions to him
and, after the draft is posted, to the community.

best,
    john