[address-policy-wg] WG Chair Collective (Re: WG chair re-selection procedure)

On 16 Sep 2014, at 12:15, Nick Hilliard <nick at inex.ie> wrote:

> I'd like to see the ad-hoc group proposals published and the mail archives of the WG Chairs opened up, so that the RIPE community can make an informed decision about whether this is best approach for handling WG Chair rotation.

As far as I remember, most of this discussion took place in physical meetings rather than on the WG Chairs mailing list. Notes of these meetings were taken I think but it is only recently that the Chairs were able to reach consensus on how these would be published: some wanted verbatim transcripts, others felt regular minutes would do. Although I would be happy to have these minutes and mail archives published, it may be difficult to do so retrospectively given that some of the then WG Chairs and WGs are not around any more. Untangling that could be more bother than it's worth.

> It is not appropriate to expect the RIPE community to be satisfied with what you correctly refer to as fag-ends of a discussion.

Maybe. However we are where we are and I am not sure there's much point raking over ancient history.

High-level overview: the WG Chairs Collective could not reach consensus after flogging this issue to death for years. Everyone agreed a transparent appointment mechanism was necessary. They just couldn't agree what it was or if it should be the same for every WG. An ad-hoc group was formed to try and break that deadlock. It didn't. So each WG was asked to come up with its own process and have that ready for RIPE69. Gert and Sander have started that for this WG. And nudged me to get things under way in DNS.

In my view the thing now is to look forwards rather than backwards. The outcome of those earlier discussions addresses the basic problem. There will soon be clear and transparent mechanisms for each WG to select its Chairs. I doubt it matters much how we got to that destination or why it took so long. The point is we're there. At last!