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Re: What do we want to achieve from reorganizing our functions?
At 10:08 AM 7/28/2003 -0700, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
--On 26. juli 2003 13:22 -0400 Margaret Wasserman <mrw@windriver.com> wrote:
The IETF runs extensively on a concept called "two-in-a-box" --
where two people are jointly responsible for most functions.
This has some benefits, but it actually takes considerably more
combined work than having a function run by one person (because
of the need for the two to communicate), and things happen
slower.
two reasons for doing this is because single-person functions have led to
single-person "empires" (Marshall Rose and the NM area was the most
blatant example; John Moy has been accused of the same thing wrt OSPF;
he's now got 2 co-chairs, but still gets accused of it), and because we've
had numerous instances of chairs dropping out on relatively short notice
(or with no notice).
Makes sense. I just think that we should understand that there
is a cost to this, and that the cost doesn't scale linearly as you
add more people to the group of people who are "in charge" of
something.
This gets even worse when there are 3 or 4 people responsible
for day-to-day management of a function. And the idea of
having more than 4 people responsible for managing anything is
almost completely unworkable.
if you have more than 2 people, is it required to designate a "lead" among
them? This frequently happens in practice, even when they are formally
equals.... I am not sure of the value of formalizing it.
I have been in groups of three or four that have functioned
without an assigned or defacto lead, but it only works (I
think) when the three or four people are very closely aligned.
In most cases, it works better for their to be a lead, although
it doesn't have to be assigned from the outside.
The point is that, once you get to a large enough group, you've
got "management by committee", and I'm not sure that's ever a
good idea...
Margaret