Re: [Rfced-future] Filling the RSCE position (was: Re: Comments on -07)

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

Eliot, Mirja,

There is another piece of this story which is that the LLC Board
has delegated almost complete authority to the Executive
Director an action that the incorporation document explicitly
allows.   Jay pointed that out to me a long time ago when I
raised the question of whether the Board had reviewed the text
of a particular proposal/consultation before it was sent out.
At least as I understand "decision", they can (and have)
delegated (at least many of) those. That is actually reasonable
and appropriate: If the ED needed to get Board review prior to
making every decision and acting on it, the result would be
complete paralysis.  Given that those delegations of authority
exist (and the Board does not proactively intervene), if we say
"the LLC", it is up to Jay's discretion when and how much to
consult the Board with the range of possibilities stretching
from "hand the problem back over to them and step back" to
"inform them in a period report what has been done".  While
presumably neither his intent in the comment Mirja quotes nor
what I would expect would happen, even the latter is probably
consistent with the Board having final signoff.

Jason, Jay, or Counsel would need to comment on this, but it
isn't even clear to me that we can mandate "the Board must be
involved before the selection committee is finalized".  We could
give guidance to the ED (which I assume we could trust Jay to
accept and follow) or we could request that the Board make such
a policy, but we basically can't tell the LLC what to do or how
to manage itself. 

So I would go a step further than Mirja: if our intent is to be
sure the membership of the selection committee is a group
process rather than selection by an individual, we'd best spell
that out, at least as clear guidance.

And, Eliot, I know you are anxious to be done with this.  So am
I and I assume everyone else here shares that desire.  However,
I am even more anxious to get things right and not leave loose
ends lying around that could easily turn into surprises and
messes to be cleaned up later.  If we had a discussion and
reached a conclusion before, I have no desire to reopen it.
However, if things various of us consider important parts of
that discussion didn't make it into the text, or if
complications or related issues become apparent only after
looking at the text, those topics should not be classified and
suppressed as "reopening" or "relitigating" -- they are just new
issues that build on the older (and settled) ones.

    john



--On Monday, January 3, 2022 16:23 +0100 Mirja Kuehlewind
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> Hi Elliot,
> 
> I'm not disagreeing, nor do I want to reopen this issue but
> now that you state it this way it feels to me it needs a bit
> of clarification.
> 
> First I was assuming that when we say IETF LLC here, we
> actually mean the Board as the IETF LCC Board is defined as
> "multi-member "manager" of the IETF LLC" in RFC8711.
> Decision have to be made by humans and not an abstract entity
> and therefore the board would be responsible here.
> 
> Further, the IETF LLC is mention two times here: 1) to form
> the selection committee, 2) to make a final decision on the
> RSCE. The board can delegate the task to "create" the
> search committee to anybody any time, however, the
> responsibility for these decisions stays with the board from
> my point of view. I don't think they can actually delegate a
> "decision".
> 
> Mirja
> 
> P.S.: I reviewed the notes you linked below and if you read
> them at whole and particularly Jay's comments (e.g. "the LLC
> board is the final sign-off"), I believe this also reflect
> my assumption that then board is responsible when we say IETF
> LLC in the text. The sentence you cited is out of context is
> from the beginning of the discussion and not the end. At that
> point the discussion was about the question if we need to
> mention a search (or selection) committee at all in the
> document or lave this entirely to the LLC.