Re: [Pesci-discuss] stack overflow

On 10/25/05 4:59 PM, "Dave Crocker" <dhc@dcrocker.net> wrote:
> What *used* to mark the IETF as distinctive was its ability to focus on
> practical issues in a timely fashion and make real forward progress.

I'm increasingly convinced that the decision-making process is
no longer appropriate for what the IETF has grown into.  There
seem to be several problems - for example, this kind of
decision-making is easy to disrupt.  Another is that as the
organization has grown there's a greater diversity of intentions
among the participants and the odds that there are participants
unwilling to compromise go up.  Another is that if it's
difficult to find people with the skills to manage these kinds
of discussions when you have three dozen working groups, it's even
more difficult to find the people when you have one hundred working
groups.  And it also seems to me that there's a big problem with
getting decisions through the stack (that word again) of
approvals before something becomes implementable.  In fact,
unlike some of those other bodies, there is no individual who
can go out and say "make <x> so" for anything in the standards-
making process.  That brings transparency, but there's a cost
for that transparency.

A difficulty with trying to change the decision-making process
is that it's so intimately connected with the membership/participation
model, and that question has a third-rail quality to it.   But
I think that the reason that decisions aren't getting made is
because the process we use for making decisions has become an
impediment.  What works well for a small group of people who are
more-or-less on the same page may not work at all well for a
large group of people with significantly divergent interests.

Melinda

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