On 2010-08-30, Tony Li wrote:
1) Finish off our existing work.
In there, the remaining leadership will have to be extra diligent. No doubt they will be, but quite likely they will require some help because the final stages of putting out a deliverable tend to be the hardest and most labor intensive, with the least visibility for any volunteer. To wit, it'd take a genuine masochist to enjoy the final rounds of editing and politics before an i-d becomes an rfc. In that situation it can be genuine hell when you can't share the responsibility with a co-chair who was previously there to share the burden.
2) Determine next topics.
Everybody likes the pie in the sky. When an integral part of the leadership has just left, it tends to be the case that everybody who ever disagreed with whoever left reintroduces their pet project. Here, that's not likely to happen too much, but it's still a well-proven risk. So I'd say, facilitate the leadership, instead of congesting the interim one. An overburdened leader equals a failed group effort.
3) Propose leadership. Once we have topics in hand, we should consider who would be the appropriate person or persons to lead the discussion.
Another very important thing, from my perspective, is that technical and research oriented lists like this one should be more or less independent of leadership. So if something suddenly comes up or goes away *simply* because of a leadership change, quite possibly that stuff has to be questioned as to its technical merits.
These kinds of changes can be a positive thing in that they unearth ideas which had political clout instead of technical merit. Either way.
What has worked for us has been the combination of someone with an academic background and contacts with someone from the IETF side of the house. This gives a good mix between theoretical and practical.
Solely judging from the archives, I very much agree. That has always been the Internet way. Other than that, as very much a newcomer to the group, I'll abstain from any concrete decision-making from here on.
(I really should introduce myself. So, I'm a thirty-ish Finnish male late-time cypherpunk and long time remote IETF/RFC follower. No degree, so I might be out of my league here, yet I do catch up on the research literature thanks to my employer offering free access to IEEE and ACM amongst others. Mostly I won't have much to add to the discussion, but this particular temptation, so soon after my joining the list, was irresistible. When the time comes, I hope to be able to contribute as somebody who's interested in external data representation as an overarching discipline.)
-- Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - [email protected], http://decoy.iki.fi/front +358-50-5756111, 025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2 _______________________________________________ rrg mailing list [email protected] http://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/rrg
