My thoughts about the problems of the IETF

[John C Klensin]

--On Friday, 02 May, 2003 11:51 -0400 Keith Moore 
<moore at cs.utk.edu> wrote:

>> But I suggest that drawing the line at compensation or not is
>> unlikely to be helpful and might be harmful.
>
> the specific risk of allowing compensation is related to the
> proposal that there be some definite threshhold of favorable
> reviews that when reached, automatically results in more
> favorable consideration for the document; along with an
> assumption that the reviewers are chosen by the proposer.
> gettting favorable consideration then becomes a simple matter
> of buying off enough reviewers.
>
> but it might be possible to tweak the idea so that this isn't
> a problem.
>
> personally I wouldn't mind being paid to do the occasional
> review, but for IETF's sake I don't want to set up a system
> that is easily gamed.

I guess I was too subtle.   My point was that, for any 
reviewer-based system to "work", one is going to have to qualify 
the reviewers.  If the reviewers --separately or in 
combination-- are able to make decisions we have previously 
reserved for the IESG, they either need to be as well 
qualified/vetted as IESG members or we need to understand that 
we are likely to be significantly lowering standards.  And, if 
the reviewers are going to effectively make decisions without 
the careful attention to balance among areas of expertise and 
cross-discussion that goes into IESG decision-making, then the 
reviewers would, I suppose, need to be better qualified/vetted 
than individual IESG members.

Against that backdrop, issues of "compensation" are trivial. 
They are just one more opportunity for conflicts of interest or 
excessive narrowness of view if we conclude that the people we 
designate to make decisions on behalf of the community can't be 
trusted to represent community views and the best interests of 
the Internet.  I note that we have no rules that would prevent 
someone from coming up to an AD and saying "I'll buy all of your 
IETF beer for the next five years if you won't object when my 
egregiously stupid proposal reaches the IESG".  We count on the 
good sense, integrity, and moral judgment of IESG members to 
ensure that such a suggestion wouldn't go anywhere, and the IESG 
selection process to ensure that we end up only with ADs whose 
standards along those dimensions are adequate.  Similar comments 
could be made about WG Chairs, editors, and many others in the 
process, and the means by which we select them.

Moreover, if participants in a WG are determined to produce a 
biased or too-narrow result, and can pick their own reviewers to 
"evaluate" it, they would be better off looking for clueless 
folks who are likely to believe whatever they (uncritically) 
read than for people who can be easily bribed: the latter are 
probably more common in the community and will pass any obvious 
conflict of interest test.   :-(

       john