AD in the room [Re: General comment on draft-ietf-problem-statement-00.txt]

Brian E Carpenter brian at hursley.ibm.com
Tue Mar 4 14:57:12 CET 2003


I've never had a bad experience due to an AD being in the room.

Most ADs will line up at the microphone if they want to make
a contribution to the discussion, but borrow the chair's
microphone if they need to make a procedural comment. As long
as they do this, I don't see any undercutting of authority.

We can't expect relationships in the IETF to run to a strict
hierarchy. We select leaders for their technical ability among
other things, and we'd be idiots not to welcome them as 
technical contributors as well as process arbiters.

   Brian

Eric Rescorla wrote:
> 
> "Harrington, David" <dbh at enterasys.com> writes:
> > I don't feel that having the AD present undermines my authority.
> >
> > My primary job as co-chair is to be a resource manager, making sure
> > the tasks that need resources get resources. Knowing how to allocate
> > resources depends on understanding the relative priorities of the
> > tasks to be accomplished to achieve the strategic direction of the
> > WG.
> >
> > An important part of my job is to try to make sure everybody
> > understands the strategic direction we are trying to folow, and then
> > make sure everyone agrees with the direction within an acceptable
> > margin of rough consensus.
> >
> > The ADs bring an important perspective to the direction discussion -
> > that the WG direction is within an acceptable margin of rough
> > consensus with that of the other WGs in the area, and that of the
> > IETF as a whole.
> >
> > I think having the ADs present is a good thing. It helps to ensure
> > that the WG doesn't go off in a direction that will later be found
> > to be unacceptable, and the WG will have wasted its scarce
> > resources.
> I think this goes to the point I was making earlier about what the
> purpose of WG chair is supposed to be.
> 
> The responsibilities of the WG chair that you enumerate above are
> essentially procedural responsibilities, namely making sure that
> consensus is achieved, that people do the jobs they've committed
> to. By contrast, you assign the substantive responsibilities (namely,
> making sure that the right thing gets done) primarily to the AD.  I'm
> not surprised, therefore, that you don't think having an AD present
> undermines that authority.
> 
> -Ekr


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