Quality Control and that nasty A word (was: Re: [mpowr] Re: [Solutions] Further work on WG (chair) roles - MPOWR WG proposal)

["James Kempf" <[e-mail]>]

Pete,

> So here's that elephant in the room: *Of course* there's a
> difference, and I'm a little concerned that you don't see it.
>
> Companies like the one you describe are strict hierarchies. The top
> of the company has the most to gain or lose (monetarily) based on the
> outcome of the efforts of the folks below. The folks further up the
> chain get to choose who is going to do the work below. If the upper
> folks don't like the work being done by the lower folks, they get new
> lower folks to do the work. The upper folks hire some sets of lower
> folks to check the work of the other lower folks. Everything is very
> congenial so long as everyone more or less cooperates. But outside of
> everything working smoothly, you bet it's a dictatorship. Though it's
> nice when there is a consensus among all of the groups, if there's
> not, management has easy ways to solve that problem.
>
> The IETF is not like that. The IETF is a consensus organization. We
> have different levels of consensus (e.g., inside the WG, the whole
> IETF), but at the end of the day, it's the entire population who
> decides whether the work is up-to-snuff. We have some procedures to
> make sure people don't make dumb mistakes along the way (including
> having some folks we think are smart do some final reviews of our
> work), and we've got some management structure to deal with things
> when all hell breaks loose, but even there it's not like the company
> you describe: The IESG can shut down a WG or say "no" to a document,
> but even in those cases, the IESG is supposed to try to resolve the
> conflict and bring the group back to consensus, not just veto. And if
> in the end we can't come to consensus with management, the rest of us
> can appeal the decision of the management, and if we decide that they
> are simply not doing the right thing, we can get rid of them using
> the recall process (or in the extreme, as happened in 1992, change
> the management structure altogether).
>

So doesn't the fact that the IESG can say "no" make it a hierarchy? I fail
to see any difference in the immediate situation between an Area Director
returning a document to a working group after AD Review and saying "fix this
or I'm not going to submit it to the IESG" and a division director saying
"fix these bugs or I'm not going to release the software".

Of course, there are differences in accountability. The division director is
only accountable to his VP while the AD is accountable to the community. As
I've said in other emails, that means that should WG chairs be given more -
it you don't like the word "authority" call it something else, maybe "X
stuff" - then there needs to be a similar accountability mechanism for them.


> Yes, that means we have given our management a good deal of
> responsibility and not very much final authority. There are some
> things that are made really hard by being in an open-membership
> consensus-based organization. Maybe it would be nice if it were
> otherwise. Personally, I kind of like it this way.
>

Sorry, I disagree. No sane person is going to take the responsibility to do
something without the authority to get it done. One argument some have made
against giving the WG chairs more X stuff is that we don't get very good
people as WG chairs. If they aren't given the X stuff to match their
responsibility, we'll get even worse.

                            jak


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