Subject: RE: Voting (again)

From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Sat, 16 Apr 2005 21:22:58 -0400 (EDT)

> From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>

OK, I'll bite...

    >> so in your mind, unless they kill off a lot of ADs, there's no
    >> accountability? 

    > There is not much accountability if they are unlikely to replace more
    > than one AD who wanted to be reappointed.

Why do you think a decent-sized, randomly-selected subset of the IETF (i.e.
the NomComm) are taking actions that are substantially more conservative (in
terms of keeping people) than the IETF as a whole would do? The *whole point*
of the NomComm is for it to have roughly the same views as the IETF as a
whole, except in a smaller body. So what makes you think that were the IETF
as a whole making the decisions, they'd be any different?

    > Why do engineers believe that they are experts in innovating
    > organizations? Is the result an improvement over traditional
    > arrangements that have been incrementally improved over centuries?

I find this comment particularly hilarious, in view of the fact that an
important part of the inspiration for the whole NomComm process was the
Athenian Constitution of 508 BC; in particular, the mechanism for the
selection of the Boule (the Council of Five Hundred), which was the chief
executive organ of the state.

As you will perhaps recall, this constitution was in itself the result of
several hundred years of tinkering with democratic systems for use in small
societies with direct democracies (i.e. a very different environment from
today's mass representative democracies, with their millions of members).

	Noel

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---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Apr 2005 19:52:07 -0700

>  Why do you think a decent-sized, randomly-selected subset of the IETF
>  (i.e. the NomComm) are taking actions that are substantially more
>  conservative (in terms of keeping people) than the IETF as a whole would
>  do? The *whole point* of the NomComm is for it to have roughly the same
>  views as the IETF as a whole, except in a smaller body. So what makes you
>  think

1. There is nothing at all random about the selection process for nomcom, 
since the pool of candidates is highly non-random.

2. The makeup of nomcom members has changed dramatically in recent years. It 
used to be that a substantial fraction of the committee were people with 
extensive IETF experience, both technical and process management.  That is no 
longer true.

3. Nomcoms in recent years have frequently renewed highly problematic ADs, 
under the claim that "no one else can do the job."  Even more bizarre, is that 
it does not seem to strike anyone as fundamentally broken that a global 
standards organization, for the technology of a critical infrastructure 
service, would be subject to such a lack of choice, and that we ought to find 
a way to fix it.  

But really, if folks want to argue that the Nomcom is somehow a legitimately  
"representative sample" of the rest of the IETF, there ought to be some 
careful reference to sampling techniques and the rest of that realm of 
research methodology.

Given the current IETF track record, in taking a very long time to produce 
specifications that are slow to get adopted -- if they ever do -- we might 
also want to wonder just a bit about that "rest of the ietf".  It was amusing, 
at the last IETF plenary, to hear someone say that if we are no careful, our 
good participants will go elsewhere.

As if that has not already been happening...

  d/
  ---
  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
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