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

On 16/09/2014 10:28, Jim Reid wrote:
> Daniel, this sounds like a nice idea in theory. However it's just not
> that easy in practice. A "one size fits all" approach simply doesn't
> work, partly for the reason you hinted at. The requirements for a Chair
> of this WG are different from those from say NCC Services. Or DNS.
> Or...

Jim, this is nonsense.  The candidates will be different but there is no 
good reason not to have the same or a similar selection process.

> The WG Chairs Collective has struggled with this issue for a long time
> and couldn't find a solution. An ad-hoc panel looked at this as well.
> They couldn't find one either.

This is plain wrong at a variety of levels.

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.

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.

Secondly, despite what you have claimed multiple times during this 
discussion, the ad-hoc panel came up with a reasonable and consistent set 
of proposals.  The WG chairs - not the wider RIPE Community - then rejected 
this because a number of them felt that:

> [...] Each WG is or should be in charge of how it runs its
> business.

In other words, a small number of the WG chairs decided to push this down 
to their own working groups, without reference to the wider RIPE community 
and without reference to the PDP.

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.

This is not ok.

Nick