RE: Re: next steps on reviewing the appeal process

[Margaret Wasserman <mrw@windriver.com>]

Hi Bert,

At 04:23 PM 9/22/2003 +0200, Wijnen, Bert (Bert) wrote:
> > Tony Hain registered his initial appeal on April 10th.  Bob and I
> > officially responded on April 28th.  Tony escalated his appeal to
> > Thomas and Erik on April 28th, and they responded on July 9th.
> > Tony escalated his appeal to the IESG on July 16th, and we still
> > haven't officially responded.  Do you consider this to be
> > acceptable?  Maybe our opinions differ about how long this should
> > take...?
> >
> Maybe you missed that Harald and Steve have requested several times in the
> meanwhile for clarifications from Tony and he has not responded once to
> any of those.... so who is at fault here?

No, I didn't miss that... but I'm not sure what we're supposed to
do in that situation.  The whole appeals process is broken enough
that it is often hard to figure out what should happen.

From the appeals I've seen so far, it seems be the rule not the
exception, that the appeals that we receive are so poorly explained,
incomplete and poorly grounded as to be completely useless.

I do agree with Thomas' point that we might try to think of a way to
make it harder to file an appeal.

Also, to appeal to higher level, it should be necessary to point
out something wrong with the decision made at a lower level.
As things are set-up currently, there is no real cost to the
appellant to raising every appeal to the highest possible level,
and we need to invest signficant time at each level to process
it.

In court appeals, the higher-level court will not hear an
appeal just because the appellant thinks that the lower level
judge was wrong. There needs to be some process or fact-related
problem with the lower court findings before a higher court will
hear the appeal.

Maybe we need something like that?

Margaret