Comments on draft-wasserman-rfc2418-update-00.txt

[James Kempf]

Pekka,

It simply isn't scalable to have 13 people take first line responsibility
for a 2000+ person technical organization with 240 working groups generating
X x 10**2 documents per year. To say nothing of requiring the full IESG to
decide whether someone should be ejected from a mailing list for disruption.
Hierarchical management is the only way to inject scalability into the
process.  Directorates help a little if the ADs use them, since they can
offload some processing, but I'm sure most ADs won't trust directorates
opinions alone with standards track documents, and many people are
suspicious of directorates because they have no official status. We can
either set up another level of management hierarchy or we can take the level
that's there, namely the WG chairs, and empower them to really manage their
WGs. Naturally, as you point out, this makes the WG chairs responsible for
their decisions, but that's part of empowerment. And, yes, WG chairs need to
be removed if they aren't performing (they are occasionally today), and,
yes, they need to commit more time to the job. To prevent an increase in
appeals, WG chairs need to understand their roles, hence the need for the
kind of training Margaret and others are trying to organize. The ADs still
have the final decision, of course, and they can still push back and the WG
chairs need to convey that to the WG, just like today. But hopefully, the
upshot will be that fewer poor quality documents are sent to the IESG.

So I agree this will be more work for the WG chairs, but you don't get
something for nothing. If we want to relieve the pressure on the IESG, the
load has got to spread out somewhere and the WG chairs are the logical place
to do it.

            jak

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Pekka Savola" <pekkas at netcore.fi>
To: "James Kempf" <kempf at docomolabs-usa.com>
Cc: <problem-statement at alvestrand.no>
Sent: Sunday, October 26, 2003 2:03 AM
Subject: Re: Comments on draft-wasserman-rfc2418-update-00.txt


> On Sun, 26 Oct 2003, James Kempf wrote:
> [...]
> > I think this will go a long way towards making the IETF process more
> > scalable, and reducing the management burden on the IESG.
>
> Yes, maybe the goal is to change the "big bad IESG" to "big bad WG
> chair".. I'm not sure whether that's a bad thing, but that it might have
> implications (such as, WG chairs getting fired more easily for not
> standing up against bad ideas, WG chairs being required to commit a lot
> more resources to the job (properly), decisions appealed more often and
> all the time wasted processing the appeals and appeals on appeals, etc.).
>
> It's just that _someone_ has to be able to tell the bad news about a
> document.  Now it's easier when the WG chair can blame the AD, and the AD
> can blame the WG ("good cop, bad cop" :-).  If you bundle these
> responsibilities in one, the WG chair (acting responsibly) would be seen
> as a lot more partial in the discussion.  The ADs and the IESG, as
> currently done, don't have to care (.. that much).  Whether that's a bug
> or feature is another thing..
>
> -- 
> Pekka Savola                 "You each name yourselves king, yet the
> Netcore Oy                    kingdom bleeds."
> Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings
>
>