Killing old/slow groups - transition thinking

[Henning Schulzrinne]

W3C, the Java Community Process and IEEE are also volunteer 
organizations in that they don't pay their participants. (That the 
participants pay them to participate only emphasizes the point.)

Also, from my involvement in professional organizations, IEEE and ACM, 
as a volunteer, I know that deadlines matter and that people, unpaid, 
are held to task if they don't deliver on time. If, for example, a 
conference chair doesn't deliver the paper review results in time, 
nobody cuts him or her any slack just because the chair wasn't paid a 
nickel to do the job. The time to negotiate a deadline is before a 
volunteer accepts the task, not afterwards, when other people depend on 
the output. (As usual, there are circumstances beyond a person's 
control, etc.)

Marshall Rose wrote:
>>let's get a grip here.  this is a volunteer organization, in a
>>declining economy, with the work being done by a class of people
>>notorious for being bad estimators of time.  adjust your
>>expectations.  we should each worry about how simply, elegantly,
>>rigorously, and promptly we do our own work before we bitch too
>>much about the speed of others.
> 
> 
> randy - at the risk of being labelled a contrarian, let me repeat to you what i
> said to jeff at the plenary
> 
> 	we've worked together a long time. there's a huge amount of good will in
> 	the audience towards you. however, at some point, the "we're volunteers"
> 	excuse is going to fall flat.
> 
> yes, the ietf is a volunteer organization. that doesn't mean we have to behave
> poorly by not enforcing our own rules...  more on this in my reply to harald,
> which is *really* going to ruffle some feathers.
> 
> /mtr