Selecting leadership, take 2

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 05:45:37PM -0800, Dave Crocker wrote:
> We have the difficult problem that there is a pretty broad-based feeling
> that the IESG needs to be more transparent and that the ability of an
> individual AD to block a working group needs to be curtailed. So, that's
> what draft-huston-ietf-pact proposes.

I'm not convinced this feeling is justified.  

"The ability of an individual AD to block a working group" is not a
problem, it's a propose solution.

What problem are we trying to solve here?  


Is it that standards are taking too long?  If so, do we have data that
one AD blocking a working group proposal is why things take so long
once it hits IESG wait?  (Versus an AD simply being lame in writing up
the report for the IESG, for example --- examination of the tracker
data would help here, once it is in use for a longer amount of time.)

Or is it that people's pet standards are getting shot down, and so
people are getting annoyed?  If so, was the AD's opposition justified?
Or was it just silly nits, such as a failure to define MUST correctly?
If the technical justification is justified, it isn't clear to me that
the solution is to make it easier for the AD's objections to be
ignored.  That way leads to a decrease in quality of the protocols.

The solution might instead be to get people involved earlier, but of
course that assumes that the WG is willing to take input.  I suspect
most of us can recall cases where we tried to help out a working
group, and was basically told to fuck off.  (That happened when some
security folks tried to fix 802.11's WEP, just to take an example from
another standards body.)  But again, that depends on what specific
problem we're trying to fix.

						- Ted