[address-policy-wg] WG chair re-selection procedure

On Sat, Sep 20, 2014 at 12:14:41PM +0100, Nick Hilliard wrote:

> [...] The candidates will be different but there is no 
> good reason not to have the same or a similar selection process.

if the RIPE community was a collective of otherwise independent
or sovereign working groups, there might be such a reason, but that's
not the case.  Also, the WG chairs do have multiple roles:

1) "run" the WG meetings
2) process a PDP proposal through the PDP in their respective WG
3) participate in the "WG chairs collective" (*)
4) participate in "other" meetings

This is mostly covered in RIPE 542 (which, although titled
"Working Group Chair Job Description and Procedures", also covers
part of the WG life cycle). The PDP was layed out in RIPE-500
at the time of publication of RIPE-542 but has been recently updated
(RIPE-614), therefore the duties under (3) above have significantly
changed.  In any case, the WG chairs have a role in the PDP, so
for good governance, their taking (and leaving) "office" should be in
line with the PDP.

> Firstly, you're voicing an implicit assumption that the WG chairs are 
> responsible for deciding the baseline scope of this policy.  In fact, this 
> is a matter of general RIPE community policy and the opinion of the WG 
> Chairs matters only insofar as they are also members of the RIPE community.

Well said, but from that it could be equally deduced that the group
was free in their choice of accepting the work and eventually not
move the result through the PDP.

> The place to discuss this is not the WG lists, but ripe-list and at the 
> plenary.  If the RIPE community comes to some form of consensus that this 
> should be devolved to the WGs, only then should this happen.  Otherwise, 
> this is subject to general RIPE community policy.

I do agree, but so far neither of us two nor anybody else has spoken up on
that list?

> The RIPE Community has a policy development process for deciding matters of 
> community policy.  Once again, it is being ignored because of top-down 
> decisions which were made in private without reference to the wider RIPE 
> community.

We're bootsptrapping. The proposed approach is better than what we have today,
albeit far from ideal.  If the community cares enough, we'll hopefully find
someone who takes the draft (meanwhile having been posted at least to
the anti-abuse-wg list) through the PDP.

Honestly, though, as much as I prefer the 'design team' output over what
has been started now, I believe the PDP has more important and serious issues than
whether all WGs eventually arrive at the same process for WG chair inauguration.

-Peter