Subject: My views on the Scenario O & C

From: Bob Hinden <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 12:39:53 -0700

My current view is that the housing the IETF administrative activity in 
ISOC (Scenario O) is the best of the two approaches.

Note: I have no position in the ISOC nor am a current member (or maybe they 
do not have members these days).  My employer is a corporate member.  I was 
a member when the ISOC was first created by Vint Cerf, but let my 
membership lapse after a year or two.

There are a number of reasons why I came to hold this opinion that I will 
try to outline below.

The problems in the IETF that is causing us to pursue the administrative 
restructuring activity are real problems and need to be solved.   We 
clearly need to have relationship with our support and infrastructure 
service providers where we are the customer.  The current situation is 
broken and needs to be fixed.

While these problems are real, I do not think they are the most important 
or difficult problems the IETF faces today.  I think the bigger problems 
are the problems with how we run the standards process (being working on in 
NEWTRK but a long way from being done) and the potential problems down the 
road with the UN based NextGen Internet governance activities.  The overall 
functioning of the IETF has serious problems and less new work is being 
done in the IETF.  Unless we fix this problem, in the long term we won't 
have to worry about how well our administrative functions are working.

Housing the IETF administrative activity in ISOC seems to me to be a much 
simpler solution to our administrative problems and will require much less 
work to get it set up.  I am concerned that the independent approach will 
take considerably more cycles and work from the IETF leadership to get it 
set up and functioning.  This will take away from working on what I 
consider to be more important problems.  There is also considerable risk 
that it will not be as easy to setup as would be liked, taking additional 
scarce resources.

The ISOC is certainly not perfect and has had serious problems in the 
past.  These problems have been solved and as far as I can tell the ISOC is 
working well.  I would note that the ISOC was initially set up by competent 
people with the best of intentions, but things did not work out as 
originally planned.  This is probably normal in any new organization.  It 
seems to me that creating another new corporation for the IETF's 
administrative functions is likely to also need some degree of 
restructuring.  This will at a minimum take resources from the leadership, 
or worse seriously disrupt the operation of the IETF.

If we go in the direction to create a new corporation for the IETF 
administrative functions (i.e., Scenario C), it will duplicate a lot of 
overhead functions.  Since any funds not derived from meeting fees will 
come from the ISOC, these funds will have two taxes applies (e.g., the 
overhead of each organizations).  I also worry that while the intention is 
to keep the new organization small, it will tend to grow and consume more 
resources on it's own over time.  We will be creating a new 
bureaucracy.  Bureaucracies tend to grow over time

Both approaches assume some amount of funding from ISOC for IETF 
activities.  This makes perfect sense in the approach where the 
administrative activity is part of ISOC, but I don't think it is very 
realistic to assume that the ISOC would give money to an independent 
administrative activity without a certain amount of control.  The ISOC is, 
of course, bound by the rules of their corporate structure that allows them 
to be a non-profit tax exempt corporation.  If they are going to be legally 
required to have some degree of control over the money they raise that is 
earmarked for the IETF, I don't see what the benefit is of having an 
independent organization.    If we could raise enough money ourselves 
(e.g., just from meeting fees or other means), this would be very 
different.  As long as we are dependent on money from the ISOC it seems to 
me that it is better to make the administrative activity part of ISOC.

The IETF currently has a very important and close relationship with the 
ISOC today.  We give them the copyrights to the standards we create, they 
are part of the nomcom process, they are part of the appeals process, they 
fund the RFC-Editor that we depend on, and we select people to be on the 
ISOC board of trustees.  It seems to me that having them also provide our 
administrative service is perfectly natural.  I think that if we can trust 
the ISOC with our standards, we ought to be able to trust them to provide 
our administrative services.

Bob

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From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 19:57:14 -0400

>>>>> "Bob" == Bob Hinden <[email-masked]> writes:

    Bob> The ISOC is certainly not perfect and has had serious
    Bob> problems in the past.  These problems have been solved and as
    Bob> far as I can tell the ISOC is working well.  I would note
    Bob> that the ISOC was initially set up by competent people with
    Bob> the best of intentions, but things did not work out as
    Bob> originally planned.  

Would you mind summarizing these problems for those of us who are
relatively new to the process?

Thanks,

--Sam

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 11:33:58 +0200

Sam,

> relatively new to the process?

There could be many different views on this, but my summary (as an
ISOC Board member and Board Chair during some of the relevant period)
is that the ISOC went through a severe financial crisis, due to
some financially disastrous annual conferences, and the economic
problems in our industry. This financial crisis made it increasingly
impossible to ignore some deep problems in ISOC's governance model.
So we made painful budget cuts (but always protecting the IETF
related expenditure), reformed the Board structure, and (to my
personal surprise) made a big success of "grandfathering"
the .org registry.

Hidden behind the governance reform was the fact that, although
some people from the IETF community joined ISOC, the majority
of the individual members were (and are) drawn from a much
broader spectrum of Internet users worldwide. They had the only
voice in electing the old Board. The IETF, and ISOC's industrial
supporters, had no voice. That needed to be changed, and was changed
starting 2001.

     Brian

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From: Scott W Brim <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 07:00:25 -0400

I agree completely with Bob.  I want to point out one issue where
vigilance will be important:

On Fri, Sep 24, 2004 12:39:53PM -0700, Bob Hinden allegedly wrote:
> Housing the IETF administrative activity in ISOC seems to me to be a
> much simpler solution to our administrative problems and will require
> much less work to get it set up.  I am concerned that the independent
> approach will take considerably more cycles and work from the IETF
> leadership to get it set up and functioning.  This will take away from
> working on what I consider to be more important problems.  

I agree in principle but part of what got us into this situation was the
feeling that we could just let ISOC (and/or CNRI) just take care of the
non-technical details.  Let's avoid even leaning that way this time.

---

From: Erik Huizer <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 13:57:50 +0200

Scott,

ISOC was not and is not responsible in any way for the activities performed 
by CNRI for the IETF.  Your remark suggests that ISOC let the IETF down on 
non-technical issues that the IETF was expecting to handle. I am not aware 
of any and I'd be interested to know if there are.

As Brian pointed out ISOC has gone thru financially troubling times, but 
even then ISOC still managed to fund the RFC-editor and perform all the 
IETF related activities. I am not aware that ISOC dropped the ball in a 
major way.

Erik

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From: Scott W Brim <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 17:09:11 -0400

On Sat, Sep 25, 2004 01:57:50PM +0200, Erik Huizer allegedly wrote:
> Your remark suggests that ISOC let the IETF down on non-technical
> issues that the IETF was expecting to handle. 

Erik, that was not my intention.  What I want to avoid is the feeling
that the friendliness of who we deal with, whoever it might be, might
allow us to be more relaxed in our handling of non-technical issues.
Does that make sense?

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From: Erik Huizer <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2004 00:30:41 +0200

I just wanted to avoid the wrong impression. Building in strict guarantees 
makes sense.

Erik