Subject: Re: leader statements

From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 14:52:55 -0400 (EDT)

> From: Arturo Servin <[email-masked]>

    > Then we have a big problem as organization, we are then leaderless.

I'm not sure this is true. The IETF worked quite well (and produced a lot of
good stuff) back in, e.g. the Phill Gross era, when I am pretty sure Phill's
model of his job was indeed as a 'facilitator', not a 'leader' in the sense
you seem to be thinking of. So why do we now need a 'leader'?

	Noel

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From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 10:58:58 -0800

> you seem to be thinking of. So why do we now need a 'leader'?

Because we've got more than 120 working groups, thousands of
participants, and the internet is now part of the world's
communications infrastructure.  I don't like hierarchy but
I don't know how to scale up the organization without it.

Melinda

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 08:38:10 +1300

> you seem to be thinking of. So why do we now need a 'leader'?

We have a collective leadership, which is quite a good system as long as
it avoids groupthink, and I think the IETF community is talkative enough
to reduce (not eliminate) that risk. But when we're invited to wider
inter-organisation meetings, we can't all go, and the ones who do go
are certain to be viewed as our leaders by the other organisations.

Inevitably, it's the Chairs who get invited; up to them to delegate
if they want.

  Brian

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From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 15:41:57 -0400

To have a leader there must be followers. Ergo there are no IETF leader
statements.

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From: "John Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 10 Oct 2013 19:43:18 -0000

>I don't know how to scale up the organization without it.

There are largish organizations that work by consensus, notably Quaker
meetings and their regional and national organizations.  But we are
not like the Quakers.  For one thing, they have long standing
traditions of how consensus works, including a tradition of "standing
aside" and not blocking consensus if you disagee but see that most
people agree in good faith.  For another, they are very, very patient.
The meeting in Ithaca NY, near where I live, took ten years to decide
about getting their own meeting house rather than rented space.  

I don't see us as that disciplined or that patient (including myself,
I'm not a Quaker, but married to one.)

So it is a reasonable question how an organization like the IETF can
govern itself.  My inclination is to be careful in the choice of
leadership, and then trust the leaders to act reasonably.

R's,
John

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From: Douglas Otis <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 15:06:42 -0500

> you seem to be thinking of. So why do we now need a 'leader'?

Agreed.

To quote Alan Greenspan about the 2008 economic debacle-

"And the answer is that we're not smart enough as people. We just cannot see events that far in advance. And unless we can, it's very difficult to look back and say, why didn't we catch something?"

Couple human limitations with a desire to accept questionable justifications at bypassing concerns driven by leadership notoriety for pushing a group's agenda.  A common symptom is to declare objections to be from an aberrant individual, even when also expressed by others.  The IETF must remain critical of its process and its leadership to better avoid future debacles.

Regards,
Douglas Otis

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From: Arturo Servin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 22:58:45 -0200

Just to clarify, I am no saying that today we are leaderless. In fact I
think we have a very good leadership.

	What I am saying is that if we that we want our leaders to only
moderate discussion we are in a big problem.

Regards,
as

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From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 11:52:43 +0900

> moderate discussion we are in a big problem.

we are in a big problem, and this is one major part.  two decades of
lack of coherent architectural oversight is another symptom of this.
i'm surprised that we are not overwhelmed with focus groups.

randy

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From: t.p. <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 10:32:44 +0100

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian E Carpenter" <[email-masked]>
To: "Noel Chiappa" <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2013 8:38 PM
> are certain to be viewed as our leaders by the other organisations.

And that for me is the point.  Regardless of how we view ourselves, it
is also a question of how others view us and, almost without exception,
organisations have leaders and will expect us to be the same.  If we
want to be perceived as leaderless, we are going to have to work a lot
harder at promulgating that point of view; and even then, I expect we
would fail.

Tom Petch

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From: Christian de Larrinaga <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 11:25:30 +0100

> i'm surprised that we are not overwhelmed with focus groups.

Maybe it is time for a Draft from our signatories so community can
consider the statement from an "architectural" perspective?

It would be useful to understand  "architectural" roots to the statement
bearing in Dave's analysis that the call to globalise IANA /ICANN is
essentially political. It is likely to have political ramifications but
was it driven politically or from some deeper engineering drivers?

Christian