GENDISPATCH Hybrid Meeting @IETF-115

Tuesday 8 November 2022

Room: Kensington 2

15:00-16:00 UTC

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GENDISPATCH Meeting

Status and Agenda Bash - Chairs and AD (5 min)

Presenters: Chairs & AD

The Relationship between the IETF and its Trust (25 min)

Presenter: Lars Eggert

draft-eggert-ietf-and-trust-00

Messages

I'm talking as an individual participant. Thanks to Martin for taking
over the gendispatch co-chair role from Pete Resnick. Thanks to everyone
who volunteered to be a co-chair too.

This document is a short document, it's a -00, motivated by the
restructuring of the Trust. Might be a bit premature for gendispatch,
but I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to get some discussion
and input.

Barry Leiba: Other than tweaking the tone to make it clear that it's not
adversial, I think it's OK - the dispatch question: it is simple enough
that it doesn't need a WG. Can be AD-sponsored, preferably by an AD who
is not a co-author. Also what is the impact of incorporating the trust
in Delaware?

John Levine: the Trust

Ted Hardie: dispatch perspective, I disagree that it could be
AD-sponsored. It should be managed by the Trust (mailing list or WG) or
a new WG with the whole IETF invited. There needs to be a level of
openness, managed by the Trust or for the whole IETF via a new WG.

Lars: clarification: sets the expectation from the IETF to the Trust for
its assets. Do you think it should include other perspectives like
IANA's assets too?

Ted: the document isn't as clear as you think it is. If you want to
limit this to just the IETF's expectations, some of it has to go. e.g.
this has to be a primary funding...

Lars: this might be too much detail for this discussion. Because the
Trust says it holds IETF IPR, therefore it's the IETF community that
should fund it. If the Trust thinks they need more diversity of funding,
that's not for the IETF to find for them.

Ted: not wearing hat. My company gave money to the trust before. There
was no confusion about which was the standards org or the trust getting
the money. Members of the community doing that - I totally agree. But
that's not clear from the doc. Community that has to agree that is big
enough that it needs a WG for the whole IETF (anyone with pocket change)
or for the Trust. Recognise that the Trust is independent and has to
remain so.

Lars: for the money question - the IETF community charged the IETF LLC
with fundraising, specifically for that. I would not want to make that
person's job more difficult by getting similarly-named organisations to
ask the same people for money. As we go further from the IETF, I'm not
sure this is true - the community expressed that they want the
fundraising to come from that fundraiser.

Ted: If the IETF LLC has a charge to raise money for a related
institution... then we agree. But it doesn't mean money can pass through
the IETF to the trust, that's the different. Dispatch question:
rat-holing immediately means you need a mailing list for the Trust or a
WG.

Lars: If it needs a WG, it's too difficult a conversation to have. So
maybe doing nothing is better.

John Levine: I was a trustee for 6 years. A lot is perfectly fine. The
reason that there is not expense reimbursement is fine. There is no HSM,
that's a bit weird but fine. I'm concerned about the issue of licences,
there used to be an asset register, now there is. That is an accurate
description of what we have. We don't know who owns the rights, who
might claim the rights,... the point of RFC3978 was to build a dyke,
everything since then we have the rights and develop the RFC etc. Stuff
before that, we made some effort to go back to the authors. We found the
previous Exec Director was a bit sloppy, we're asking people to redo
their licences. Before 3978, we don't know; after, we have that RFC.
This document can be fixed, with people with more trust experience - I'm
happy to help. But also for engineers, to explain how we do this in a
way that they understand the process and how it enables the IETF to work
in a unique way.

Lars: This might be a misunderstanding but I think we have an asset
type registry. We have X number of badges, logos, recordings, ...
buckets of things. It's not a register where you see what is in it. The
list is from an ietf.org website. If that's the register that they used,
they should be clear to the IETF that they rely on that and the IETF
need to maintain it therefore. The Trust has immensely improved, and I'm
not saying the trajectory is not incredibly positive.

Ted: Not dispatching at this point.

John Levine: Create the document to explain to the community, something
like I would not call it "IETF licences for dummies" but something like
that.

Leslie Daigle: Agree with Ted's point. Makes sense to discuss with the
IETF what it needs from a document on how it operates things with the
trust. Anything that needs an opinion needs to go out. Would you ever
say IANA does this well, does this badly etc - no, it's for them, take
that out. But saying what the IETF needs for its trust, that's the
output.

Lars: agree, another revision makes sense.

Rich Salz: This needs a WG, that's how we get consensus. Under Jay.

Lars: at LC, we get consensus.

Rich Salz: That would be the longest last call in history.

Glenn Deen: Current IETF Trust chair. One of the points you made, we
don't have office hours - we do now (the document points this out). We
have them on Thursday, please come. We have a lot of current and past
trustees. It was made in 2005. A lot of trustees, a great tradition. I
want to clarify: you said "the trust holds assets". We don't, we hold
the rights not the assets. We're not in charge of physically storing
or making them available.

Lars: helpful, thank you.

Stephan Wenger: One request, go into the content of this document - I
would refuse. Please let's not discuss substantial content here. For
dispatching, this ought to be fairly heavy weight if you want to
continue, with liaisons. The alternative is do nothing. Frankly, we're
not deaf - this document is there, we can listen to it. If this draft
went away quietly, and formal channels to the trustees were made, to
complain or suggest, that would be my opinion on the best way forward.

Lars: good advice, when Ted said a WG I was worried about that
mechanism.

Stephan: don't do it lightly, too scary to do it that way.

Alissa Cooper: I agree with people who said you should do a WG. The IPR
agreement needs formal communication. For the purposes of maintaining
good relations, you don't want to hand it off to someone and do it
AD-sponsored. Some of the things that you point out reflect a
long-standing need for more administrative support for the Trust. Might
not be lacking now, but maybe it was before - and we are seeing the
effects of that now. I thought moving assets to IETF LLC would have
helped that, but that's not the path we did. It's good to document the
needs of the community, but that's not going to fix those issues.

Bob Hinden: I'm one of the former trustees. I agreed with Leslie. as a
communication from the IETF to the Trust about what it needs, that's
good. But the IETF shouldn't tell the Trust it needs to do things
different. If it's a set of requirements, I think it's fine. I don't
have a strong view on how the work progresses (WG mailing list).

Glenn Deen: Just want to say I hear you about funding, we are trying to
figure it out. We knew there was a worry, and we're working together. We
had a couple of in-person meetings, then COVID and that made some rough
edges. This week it's been helpful (at IETF114, I was sick with COVID in
my room) to see everyone. The future looks bright.

Leslie Daigle: My previous comments were on this particular document. I
wanted to reinforce your role as IETF Chair and who takes on the work.
Whether or not there's a WG or not, is teetering on whether people want
to dig in on funding and doing it right, or just being clear on what the
IETF needs from the Trust. We don't tell IANA on how they should
restructure themselves, we should not do it to the Trust.

Lars: We're not telling them how to restructure themselves.

Leslie: Stephan captured it when he said a lot of this is hard to talk
about openly in public.

Mirja Kuehlewind: We should also be doing this "informal communication"
that people are saying, but if we don't have formal channels, this
doesn't happen. I would like a WG to work on that problem and also this
document - not how the trust organises itself, but the relationship
between the Trust and the IETF.

Lars: a WG would burn a lot of energy. Maybe a better solution is to
establish an informal liaision.

Mirja: It should not be informal, it should be formal.

Alissa: Question about Stephan's point about incorporation in Delaware,
should we do that after the incorporation when the Trustees could
participate more openly.

Lars: that was my understanding.

Stephan Wenger: Slightly different - we can buy insurance in that case
so we aren't so open.

Jason Livingood: Just for the avoidance of doubt, we can F2F meetings
and matching funding agreement from ISOC. We can use that to turbo
charge fundraising for the Trust, we're putting things into the 2023
budget for that too.

Stephan Wenger: I wanted to say exactly the same thing as Alissa. It's
probably wise to finish one thing, before we start another. And that one
thing is the restructuring. Let's finish one project.

Lars: might leave this document hanging for a while. Understand the need
for a WG. Might not have the energy.

Glenn Deen: We (the Trust) do want to hear from you. We have open hours,
please see us.

Summary (5 min)

Presenters: Chairs

Dispatching: document needs revision to clarify scope, AD-sponsored is
not right, so needs a WG for discussion. Also a call to wait until the
Trust has restructured.

Flextime & AOB (25 mins)

Lars: PR action announcement and a LC discussion that was quite long -
significant number of people who said BCP83 and broader moderation
mechanism who said our view on participation needs a rethink, if people
have energy to take that one, it would be dispatched here. If that
happens, people need to come with a proposal that can be discussed in
detail.

Bron Gondwana: Agree that there's some work to be done in this area.
Especially that forms of communication need to be changed, forms of
humour and stuff, if they are not recommended and challenged, the
correct response is "sorry, my bad" rather than "I have a right to speak
like this".

Kirsty: sounds dangerously close to volunteering to write that document,
Bron...