Subject: [Iasa20] Thoughts on draft-haberman-iasa20dt-recs-01.txt

From: Ted Hardie <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2017 12:11:32 -0700

Thanks for your time and care on this.

Reading through it, I was particularly struck by a much stronger
recognition that some of the issues we face are because of decline in
volunteer time as well as external support.  It remains a bit hard to
understand the design team's perception of how these proposals will
influence those, but I attribute this to the design team hoping community
members will analyze this for themselves.  Still, if the design team has a
consensus view, a somewhat stronger statement of it would be welcome.

By my reading, IASA++ represents a very wide range possibilities, from
something close to "do nothing but be open about the issues" (publish this
doc and stop, in other words) to a restructuring of the activity within
ISOC that would be similar in scope to setting up a subsidiary.  It may be
useful to mark out some explicit point along that spectrum, as different
community members' understandings of that activity may result  a false
sense of shared understanding.

I also note that the draft discusses the IETF's administrative arrangements
without quite saying explicitly that these include the IRTF and IAB.  It
would be useful to make that clear.  It is particularly noteworthy on the
IAB front because of two issues.  First, the charter of of the IAB (RFC
2850, Section 2) explicitly calls out that it has a dual role as a
committee of the IETF and an advisory body of the Internet Society.
Second, the IAB manages many liaison relationships for the IETF community,
but some of these are formally arrangements with the Internet Society.  The
Category A liaisons to ISO managed by the IAB are, for example,
relationships between ISO and ISOC:
https://www.iso.org/organization/9418.html .  ISOC is also a sector member
of the ITU-T, and that is the source of some of our ability to interact
with the ITU.  It is my perspective that moving to an entirely separate
organization would required that these be recreated (no doubt with ISOC's
support).  It is not clear to me whether the creation of a subsidiary would
trigger the same requirement, but it seems less likely or necessary in that
case (as the formal relationship remaining with ISOC could be part of the
subsidiary agreement).

The draft also discusses the potential relationship of new entities with
the IETF Trust.  My personal take is that this is no longer simple, because
the IETF trust also holds the IANA IPR on behalf of a larger community.  I
would recommend not trying to move it into another organization, at least
until that organization is well-established and the impact of the change on
its stability can be assessed.  The agreement of the wider community would
also be required.

My next comment is on the delicate subject of money.  Going through this
exercise is already costing us volunteer time, and many of the changes
proposed will result in staff time either on a one-off or a continuing
basis.  Change for change's sake is expensive, in other words, and we
should generally justify it either in very clear community needs or in
substantial returns on the investment in change.  Transparency-related
changes seem to me to fall in the community needs category.  Within the
document I see three changes that seem to be strongly focused on monetary
returns on investment :

1) Clear fund-raising responsibilities (discussed in Section 5.5)
2) Improve accounting of costs (discussed in section 6.3)
3) Support a re-envisioned funding model (discussed in section  6.1)

Some other proposed changes are not so clear.  The inclusion of a director
of communications in the proposed staff, for example, might be to support
awareness of the organization for fund-raising purposes, to support
awareness and adoption of our standards, or to support awareness of our
work to encourage participation by new volunteers.  Clarity on how the work
will support the IETF in the future would be a useful touchstone in
analyzing whether this is a change that is a must-have for right now.

Lastly,in the interests of full transparency, I think the Internet Society
has been a consistent source of support and insight  since we made the
previous transition, and I generally favor the approaches which maintain a
strong relationship between the IETF and ISOC.  I agree that the changes in
activities on both sides necessitate a re-examination of how that
relationship works, and if the most appropriate change is to a subsidiary
structure, I am ready to support that.  But I disagree with Richard's
analysis that IASA++ is an inferior form of the subsidiary approach.
IASA++ could imply a much stronger integration with ISOC than we have
previously seen, and that could go in a variety of ways.

To give one example, ISOC could decide in the course of the IASA++
re-organization to use a more-contractor heavy approach to some of its
other work and to manage the overall costs by using the same contractors
for IETF work and other Internet Society work. That approach (similar to
the "task requester" approach used in some government agencies) would be a
change to the way the Internet Society works that would make the IETF work
a more natural fit to ISOC's other working methods.   Put another way,
IASA++ is really an Internet Society reorg, and assessing whether or not it
is the right choice depends heavily on the extent to which ISOC is
interested in a re-org of that scope, which would necessarily affect its
other activities if it is to be successful.  I am happy to note that the
ISOC Board is meeting in Singapore just after the upcoming IETF, and I hope
that clarity on that point can come from them as well.

Thanks again for your work on this,

Ted