--On Saturday, 12 February, 2000 14:40 +0800 "Rahmat M.
Samik-Ibrahim" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I also believe what Klensin wrote is still valid:
>
> ..............................................................
> ........
>
> [... 22 Feb 1996 ... skipping voting out of existence, fine
> lunches and dinners, and irresolvable controversy
> pronouncements...]
My, my, do I love being quoted out of context on a comment that
was made four years ago, and was intended as humorous rather
than a serious comment on the process. I don't remember the
comment or its context, but strongly suspect from the partial
sentence excerpt that it was _never_ "valid" except as a
sarcastic and/or cynical remark, made in passing and intended to
mean the opposite.
Rahmat, this is one of the difficulties with the path you seem
to want us to go down. Except when formally hearing an appeal
and, possibly in a very small number of other cases (I can't
identify any at the moment, but don't want to get into a
nit-picking argument with you about whether they exist), the IAB
isn't a formal deliberative body. And, even when we face those
more formal situations, we are not, as we pointed out recently
in another context, a court of law and will not try to behave
like one. Instead, we operate very informally, as a collection
of people trying to collectively understand issues and help the
IETF move forward. All of those people bring strong technical
skills and experience to the table, rather than being
professional or amateur lawyers or the like. If you don't like
the composition of the IAB in terms of the individual profiles
and personalities, that is a Nomcom issue, not a charter or
procedural one.
In working informally --with each other and with the IETF
participant community (especially those who are making technical
contributions)-- we also tend to be human. Under stress, some
of us even become cynical or engage, informally, in what we call
in the US "black humor". So, as you must know, do several other
professional population groups: this shouldn't be any surprise
or cause for concern. But that informal process is precisely
what permits us to work as a team, in spite of different
backgrounds and perspectives, and quite often come up with
results that are clearer and better than any of us could have
produced alone. Tying us up in procedures, or requirements that
we expose and document every word spoken or written, would, at a
minimum, cripple our ability to get anything done. That would,
of cousre, prevent our doing harm by preventing our doing
anything, but I, at least, don't see that as in the best
interests of the IETF or the Internet generally.
I think those of us who have been following your notes over the
last few years understand your concerns but generally do not
agree. As, I believe (haven't checked), the only member of the
current or upcoming IAB with significant professional training
in the social and behavioral sciences, I am probably more
sympathetic than most to your desire for a clear historical
record. But --precisely because I continue to be interested in
the interactions between process, formal procedures, and
results-- I don't think it is productive in this case,
especially to what, IMO, is the extreme to which you want to
take things. More specifically, I would personally prefer to
avoid turning the IETF, or any of the related or subsidiary
structures, into an experiment in political theory or utopianism
(mine or anyone else's).
With regard to your substantive comments about appeals and jury
processes... The reality is that all of the appeals that have
reached the IAB within my memory have involved significant and
often complex technical components, typically including
questions of whether WG, WG Chair, or IESG decisions on a
particular issue were reasonable in the light of some technical
argument. They haven't been exclusively procedural, or
exclusively technical, but a inseparable mix of the two. In
the "outside world", the historical experience with
randomly-chosen juries in that type of situation has been fairly
terrible. That is not surprising: if one doesn't understand the
issues but is forced to make a decision, one decides on some
other basis. It is also well-known that, if the randomly-chosen
members of the jury can be educated about the issues, then
results get better: but that is a time-consuming process and can
easily lead to claims about the biases of the educators who
must, recursively, be selected and/or monitored by some process
that reduces or eliminates those concerns.
Now, if we were dealing with exclusively procedural appeals, I
would agree with you that an independently-selected appeals
body, one that could deal with conflicting claims about what had
occurred on an adversarial and evidentary basis, would be a
better and more convenient idea. I actually suggested that a
few years ago, possibly in the document from which you extracted
the above, because I assumed we would see mostly that type of
appeal. But, if I recall, the community rather throughly
rejected that idea. And, in retrospect, I'd assume that at
least part of the reason was that I was wrong: while there would
still be some attraction to getting appeal work off the IAB's
agenda (my other motivation at the time), we haven't seen those
types of appeals.
I could quibble with some of your other suggestions (e.g.,
picking people conditioned on attendance would result in an
uncomfortably biased (in the statistical sense) group,
especially if an appeal addressed the way in which a
mailing-list-only participant was being treated. But it isn't
worth it: the general idea itself is fatally flawed by an
incorrect assumption about the nature of the appeals that arise.
Conversely, blue-ribbon appeals panels for more technical issue
have some logical appeal, but would, I believe, create a
different sort of bias, one that involves very slow procedures
and responses. And a non-trivial fraction of IETF participants
seem to have a deep suspicion that people who _really_ want to
serve on such things should be disqualified as
non-representative of the community, if not outright insane,
which is probably not a good basis for trust in such panels.
The system isn't perfect, but options such as the ones you
suggest were considered and the conclusion was that, on balance,
the present setup isn't significantly worse than other possible
choices and better than many of them. And I think actual
experience so far, as distinct from theorizing about
possibilties for what might happen or about ideal processes, has
largely confirmed the acceptability of those choices.
john
p.s. The above remarks have not been examined to be sure that no
word could possibly be misinterpreted by someone inclined to do
so. So now I guess I get to spend the next year or four
worrying about which phrases will be taken out of context and
used ot demonstrate something I don't believe (either now or "by
then") :-(
