[dns-wg] reminder about the WG Chair appointment process

On 25 Nov 2014, at 12:37, Nick Hilliard <nick at foobar.org> wrote:

> Jim, the proposal is non-deterministic.

Nick, thanks for your comments.

I'm both surprised and disappointed. Surprised because the mood of the room/WG appears to be the proposed text is "good enough". Nobody has advocated making radical surgery to it despite the proposed text being in circulation for almost two months now. I'm disappointed that you've not provided alternate text to address the concerns you raised. This is not helpful.

> There's no discriminator in place
> to decide who gets to stand down if N changes and two chairs need to stand
> down at the same time, or if somehow the chair terms become synchronised.

Just apply common sense. If we go from 3 to 2 WG co-chairs, the one that's next due to stand down does not get replaced and the remaining ones get their terms cut by one year. If we then go from 2 to 3, do the reverse: extend the current terms by a year and slot in a new co-chair appointment at the newly-created gap in the cycle. If a co-chair leaves mid-term, the replacement (if one) gets appointed for the remainder of that term and we carry on from there: no muss, no fuss. Says he making it up as he goes along.... :-)

> Drawing lots is fine but where, how, who, what?

In whatever place and format that the WG decides is resonable and appropriate: presumably at a webcasted session of the WG. A decision on that is implementation detail and since it may change from time to time, I think it's undesirable to have a rigid definition here.

IMO RIPE should always operate with the minimum of rules so there's the maximum flexibility to deal with issues in the most pragmatic way whenever they pop up. This is what differentiates our community from ICANN. Or the ITU. It would be great shame if that got lost. It would be even worse if we deliberately chose to follow the models used by those institutions.

> What happens if the WG goes to blazes and there's only one chair and that chair is subject of a mutiny?

If that ever happens, bring in Bijal to kill the WG. :-) The WG would clearly be irreedemably broken by then and cannot continue. The community can then decide to create a new WG (or not) using the usual mechanisms of running a BoF or two, finding a possible chairman and drafting a new chapter. This seems so obvious to me, it shouldn't need to get documented in some Big Book of Working Group Procedures resting in the Holy Grail at the Temple of Process. [Hey, isn't that the title of the next Indiana Jones film? :-)]

There's nothing in the current proposal to deal with one of the WG co-chairs getting incapacitated by killer sharks with mind-control lasers. Or all co-chairs disappearing in a mysterious boating accident involving the Loch Ness monster. The point I'm making here is inventing rules to cover every potential corner case and scenario is a mug's game. I hope everyone has got better things to do.

IMO all that's needed is to agree and document the fundamental principles. How these get applied can be decided if/when some unforseen circumstance emerges and what approach is best to handle that, getting consensus from the WG if need be. I would expect the WG can trust itself to take a reasonable and pragmatic course of action at that point. If it can't, no amount of rules or process is going to help.

> Maybe this isn't important

+1

> and we can do the usual trick of sweeping it
> under the carpet and pretending that it doesn't exist / isn't a problem /

Works for me. YMMV.

> oh look at the nice view out the window over there.

Look! A squirrel!