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Liaison handling (Re: IAB comments on draft-baker-liaisons-00.txt)

Fred,

--On 25. august 2003 14:15 -0700 Fred Baker <fred@cisco.com> wrote:

But understand that the objective here is not to send documents to the
IETF. It is to get replies from the IETF that are authoritative, and get
them on a schedule. Apart from that, there is no point to sending liaison
statements. And the ITU feels that it is not getting authoritative
replies on a schedule.

my personal take is that we have a problem here that mechanism can't fix.
The IETF relies on personal responsibility to get its work done; in the particular case of liaison statements, we've relied on liaisons (persons) to follow up and use their best judgment in making sure the relationship works, and call upon the resources of the rest of the IETF as needed.

That mechanism has failed.

With all respect to Scott: If the ITU has been sending liaison statements to the IETF that the IETF has not responded to, and the ITU thinks it should, Scott, as our liaison to the ITU, has a problem.
That problem may involve the fact that other people aren't responding when he asks them to - but if there is an organizational base problem, and we don't look at the base problem, the only result of adding more mechanism will be to make the base problem better documented.

Since Scott has been part of the process that produced this document, I must assume that Scott thinks that this process will help him, in ways that the current "statements@ietf.org" mechanism cannot. Scott, can you confirm that?

But this document is not aimed at the ITU only; it's aimed at liaisons in general. So I'd think one logical step would be to ask the people we have made responsible for our liaison relationships:

- Do you see the problems described in this document?
- Will the processes described in this document make a significant difference in solving them?

Our liaison people are listed on the IAB web page. They should be easy to ask.

Harald