RFC Editor Futures Program Minutes

12 Jan 2021

Eliot Lear & Brian Rosen

Agenda

We reviewed the agenda:

• Note Well
• Bash
• Review Issues 13, 15, RSEA Responsibility table – don’t expect to get through them all
• Next Meeting
• AOB

The only bashing that took place was that we asked people to mute when not talking.

Issue 13: Is participation open to all?

There has been quite a bit of discussion about this issue. Eliot presented a new round of text (see chairs' slides). There were a few comments:

• EKR suggested a slight word change withn regard to GitHub.
• Mark Nottingham suggested a word change relating to "open to the public."
• EKR made the point that there are a bunch of related policies that need to be addressed, like anti-harrassment. There was general agreement that we should avoid re-inventing the wheel, but that some of the policies needed to be adapted from IETF usage (this group won't have ADs to oversee them, for instance).

This left us for the moment with the following:

All strategic body meetings are open to any participant, subject to Note Well provisions. At body's initial formation, all discussions are to take place on open mailing lists, and anyone is welcome to comment / discuss. The strategic body may decide by rough consensus to use additional forms of communication (for example, Github as specified in [RFC8874]) that are consistent with [RFC2418].

There was general agreement in the meeting on this text. People should state whatever disagreements they have by the 23rd of January.

The one area one might expect further development would be on referencing the anti-harassment and other management policies, as discussed above. John Klensin graciously took the action to review the IETF version of those policies so that he could call out what would be the delta to make use of them. We are hoping to see that text before the 23rd of January.

Issue 15: Who makes final decisions on strategy?

We had a wide ranging discussion about the "hybrid model". The primary question we discussed was “Can approve or disapprove output because…”

This led to a discussion about whether this was an oversight committee, an appelate body, or both, and whether a further appelate body was required. We discussed the parameters that the any oversight body would use to approve or disapprove.

• You didn’t follow the process?
• This {cannot be implemented for/would break} my stream?
• Would harm some set of users who are not represented in the working group?
• This would break the series?

There were a number of concerns raised:

• The risk of failure to adequately take into account expertise.
• "Mob rule" in the WG.
• The oversight committee making decisions that either did not or would not garner community support (e.g., going rogue).
• Death by too many committees.
• The functions described may best not be handled by the same people. For instance, the stream managers clearly have equities in terms of “Would this proposal break my stream” but may not be the best people to handle a process appeal.
• The oversight committee might not be sufficiently engaged in the working group.
• There needs to be a way to take in external liaison information.

A number of other points were made:

• The oversight body might manage last calls.
• Perhaps there should be term limits on this body
• How are decisions handled that might break the series?

Later in the meeting, a related issue was raised: what would be the decision process for this oversight body? Should streams have vetos? Should it be a vote? Should it be consensus? We didn't get very far in this discussion.

We then looked at composition of the oversight body, noting that we would expect to iterate between that point and the previous. There was general agreement that the stream managers should be on the oversight committee. There was also general agreement that there should be no representation from the ISOC BoT. While EKR posited some logic for including NOMCOM-appointed people, the general sense was that this was not a good idea.

There was general agreement the LLC shouldn't have voting representation. It may be the case that the LLC, RSE and tooling teams have some form of advisory role on this oversight body.

EKR agreed to write some text that would begin to address the role of the oversight committee. All others are welcome to do the same. He hopes to have that by around the 23rd. We will return to this issue at our next interim.

Issue 25: who writes the SOW.

The chair mentioned but we deferred discussion of who writes the SOW.

RFC Editor Responsibility Table

We had a brief discussion about this table. In general, it was felt that there was a clean break down for most of these responsibilities, where the strategic decision functions are taken on by the WG, and the execution/operational elements are taken on by the LLC. The one area that needs more attention: who represents the series?

Next meeting

Doodling now. Please answer doodle.

AOB

There was no other business.