Subject: IESG Response to JFC Morfin on the Appeal concerning its approval of the "draft-ietf-ianaplan-icg-response"

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2015 11:01:27 -0700

On 11 March 2015, the IESG received an appeal from JFC Morfin 
<https://www.ietf.org/iesg/appeal/morfin-2015-03-11.pdf> concerning 
its approval of the "draft-ietf-ianaplan-icg-response."   Below is the 
IESG's response to that appeal:

The IESG interprets the appeal as having two elements: one is largely
focused on making comments about the IANAPLAN document and the other
is asking questions about what the consensus on the document means.
The IESG notes that appeals are not a supplement to participation in
the working group, and that the appellant did, in fact participate in
the working group process. We recognize that the appellant is seeking
to make a precautionary appeal as stated at the beginning of the
appeal text. The IESG considers that the RFC 2026 appeals process is
only available for handling actions that have already been performed,
and that appeals cannot be used to develop questions about potential
future actions or outcomes. The IESG further notes that appeals of
this length, and appeals that use novel and/or unfamiliar terminology
and expect readers to understand it are not helpful to the process.
We strongly encourage appellants to be brief, clear, and to the point.

The actionable substance of the appeal appears to be that the
consensus on the IANAPLAN document is in question because (1) the
appellant was not given proper consideration by the working group, and
(2) organizations, such as IEEE, W3C and other lesser known
organisations were not included and given consideration.

The appellant also calls the working group charter into question, but
he has brought charter issues up before and there has been no
consensus to make changes in response to those issues, and the time is
well past for appeals related to the content of the charter: the
charter approval was announced on 8 September, 2014, so the two-month
period specified in Section 6.5.4 of RFC 2026 ended in early November.

The IANAPLAN working group, in common with other IETF working groups
and according to IETF process, considers input according to the issues
and arguments raised, not favoring input from organizations (through
liaisons) over input from individuals, and allowing all contributions
to be made via the working group mailing list. Announcements of the
working group's charter were made, as is usual, on the ietf-announce
and new-work mailing lists, to ensure that individuals from all
organizations could be informed of the work and participants were
solicited in that manner. Quite a number of individuals have
participated as a result of that solicitation. Further, some
organizations have given input through formal liaison channels. It is
the IESG's judgment that the process has been followed correctly in
this regard.

It is the IESG's judgment, having reviewed the working group's email
archive, that Mr Morfin had significant participation in the working
group, that his input was considered, and that where he was not
satisfied with the result, it was not because he was ignored. The
appellant also notes that because there is a PR action preventing him
from posting to the IETF discussion list, he could not participate in
the last call of the document. Yet the last call notice says that
"Exceptionally, comments may be sent to [email-masked] instead." Mr
Morfin could well have participated in last call through that means,
and did not. He also does not cite any issues that were discussed
during last call that he was barred from commenting on.

The IESG, therefore, considers that all individuals and organizations
were given the opportunity to contribute to the discussion according
to normal IETF processes, that no person or organization was denied
the ability to contribute, and that all contributions received were
properly handled and considered. Consequently, the IESG denies this
appeal.

The IESG further notes that the IANAPLAN document is very clear about
what the scope of the document is, and that it is specifically in
response to the request for input from the IANA Stewardship Transition
Coordination Group (ICG). No further scope is implied nor can be
inferred.