Carsten Borman (T2TRG Chair)
Jenny Bui (IETF Secretariat)
Reese Enghardt (ICCRG Chair)
Stephen Farrel (UFMRG Chair)
Liz Flynn (IETF Secretariat)
Mallory Knodel (HRPC Chair)
Mirja Kuhlewind (MAPRG Chair)
Dirk Kutscher (ICNRG/DINRG Chair)
Allison Mankin (At-Large Member)
Colin Perkins (IRTF Chair)
Dave Oran (ICNRG Chair)
Colin Perkins (IRTF Chair)
Brian Trammell (PANRG Chair)
Lixia Zhang (DINRG Chair)
The minutes of the July 02 2024 IRSG Teleconference were approved.
Colin thinks that the document looks like a good starting point.
Mallory has seen communications back and forth with the editors so things are on track.
Colin mentions that he has asked Eve Schooler if she could review draft-irtf-nmrg-green-ps, but Colin has not received a reply yet.
Brian volunteered to review draft-irtf-nmrg-green-ps.
Colin responds by saying that he was going to ask Brian to review the Code of Conduct, but if he's willing to do both.
Brian replied that he can do both.
Colin mentions that he was looked at draft-irtf-cfrg-opaque over the weekend, and that should go out either today or tomorrow but he still needs to look at the other two. Colin also adds that there's still a Datatracker bug that things in IRSG review expires, which is why draft-irtf-coinrg-use-cases has disappeared.
draft-perkins-irtf-code-of-conduct-04
Colin starts by saying that he presented the Code of Conduct in the IRTF Open meeting in Vancouver and in the plenary and asked for feedback, and so far have received zero comments. At this stage, Colin thinks it's done from the IRSG point of view as it has been talked about numerous times in the IRSG. Colin has also submitted an update last week that fixed a couple of typos. Colin plans to issue the IRTF wide Last Call on this draft this week, giving people a couple of weeks to comment.
Colin then asks the group to highlight the draft when it goes out. Colin also asks Brian to do the IRSG Review.
Brian agrees to review the document, and also mentions to put the document in the IRTF Stream so that he could do the IRSG review.
Colin asks is it not in the IRTF Stream?
Brian replies that no stream is defined.
Colin says he will fix that.
Dave chimes in and says that it once was, but then the update put it in no steam identified.
Colin says that he submitted the updated draft and the update broke it.
Dave agrees that's what probably happened.
Colin says that he used Martin Thomson's Github automation tool, and it probably doesn't work for IRTF Stream documents that don't belong to an RG. Colin will fix that, and hopefully it will be ready to be in IRSG Final Poll by the next meeting, assuming no one has significant comments or feedback.
Colin has sent an email about this a couple of days ago, and pointed to a Google Doc which a couple of people have commented on and there were some discussions on the mailing list.
This is something that came up in the IAB a couple of months back when they were discussing the call for nominations and figuring out what were the requirements for the IRTF Chair, and how everything works in the IRTF. It was realized that there was an IAB conflict of interest policy that applies to the IRTF Chair, but no actual policy written down for what the conflict of interest policy was for the IRTF Chair when acting as the IRTF Chair rather when acting as the IAB member.
This is Colin's attempt writing down a minimal policy for what should the IRTF Chair do about conflicts of interest and it says that the IRTF Chair should disclose potential conflict of interest, which they have to do anyway because of their IAB role, and if there's a potential conflict, they should discuss it with the IRSG and come to an agreement on how to proceed. That may just be that people think it's sufficient to declare the conflict so everyone is aware of what's going on and there's some transparency or it's maybe they need to recuse themselves or something depending on the conflict and what's going on or what decision is being made.
Dave asked, it says that the IRSG members must disclose potential conflict of interest; where is that written down?
Colin responds that that is not currently written down anywhere, and that is the thing where there's maybe a bit more discussion. The fact that the IRTF Chair needs to disclose it is self-explanatory but there currently isn't a policy about IRSG members or about working group chairs in the IETF. Colin figured it probably made sense to write something even if that something just says, make sure that obvious conflicts are disclosed, and recuse yourself and let your co-chairs do anything where there's an obvious conflict.
Dave thinks that all makes sense, but asks is it the responsibility of the IRTF Chair to ensure that the IRSG members actually conform to the conflict of interest policy? So indirectly implicates the IRTF Chair to be a policeman.
Colin thinks that's a good point. The way this works in the IAB, for example, is that the Secretariat does a call for possible conflicts of interest every March when the membership rolls over, and maybe it's sufficient to do something like that. Colin does not want the IRTF chair policing it, but we want at least some honesty policy and ask people to make disclosures.
Dave adds that it'd be helpful to RG Chairs, IRSG members, and the chairs with the appropriate roles limited as need be, but doesn't know if it needs to go that far.
Rather than having another document saying IRSG members have a conflict of interest policy, although the title of this one seems to say it does apply to IRSG members.
Colin responds that he wrote this in a way that does have a paragraph that talks about IRSG members and similarly it talks about other activities such as the ANRW program chairs. Colin thinks if we're going to have a conflict of interest policy then it should probably say how it applies to everyone in various IRTF leadership roles, depending where you are, that may have more or less effect. It's not that many things a research group chair can have a conflict of interest about other than document approvals and which documents can get adopted, whereas the IRTF more things where they have potential conflicts about.
Dave agrees, although there were some interesting discussions about particular cases in the last couple of years where there was alleged conflict of interest for our RG Chair or two that wound up being not exactly easy to take care of.
Colin adds that a lot of it is about protecting the RG Chairs, if you have a document that says make sure things are clearly documented if you have potential conflicts and they follow that then it protects them from accusations that they may not want.
Dave thinks that maybe we should actually just have section titles or things that are IRTF, general, IRTF chair, IRSG, and RG Chairs so it is clearly laid out just from a formatting perspective.
Colin adds that he is mostly hoping to get today, is if people agree that it makes sense to have a written policy of interest. If people do agree, is this going broadly going in the right direction? And if so, we can wordsmith it and sort out the details on the list or in the document. If it's not, or if people don't agree then what if anything should we be saying?
Brian thinks it should be written down. This is a good start. The question that Brian would like to see answered from a principle standpoint is, do we need a fundamentally different conflict of interest policy for the IRTF Chair versus a research group chair versus a IRSG at large member? He suspects the answer to that is no. Brian also thinks that the text in the document can be shortened a bit since he doesn't want to have a sort of automatic police keep alive process that is written down.
Colin says the call for conflict of interest works for the IAB because they have a defined term and everything rolled over at the same time.
Brian thinks that there could be a reminder to the IRTF Chair to check for this when appointing members to the IRSG.
Colin wouldn't object if the Secretariat sends a reminder to the IRSG at the same time as the IAB saying, make sure these things are up to date.
(Jenny will look into this)
Brian thinks as a matter of administrative-ness, yes, but as a matter of writing down in the policy note, no.
Stephen adds there are other kinds of conflicts we deal with in particular with the ANRW calls and reviews, and it might be worth a note in the document even if it's only a reminder to future IRTF Chair that's continuing to do the things the way we've done them in the past is probably a good idea.
Colin says that certainly ANRW Chairs and people on the ANRP committee and that sort of thing have potential conflicts, and probably people doing Travel Grants.
Stephen says he thinks it's a good start.
Allison thinks that Stephen brought up a good point about the way that conflict of interest is done in conferences; it's very strict and there's a lot of corner cases when you have a bunch of groups. Allison speculated that the IESG has not done a conflict of interest policy.
Colin thinks that the IESG does, but there's not a written one for working group chairs.
Allison asks if you are a RG Chair, do you have stricter requirements? For example, you can't approve or advance, you have to recuse off a document that's by one of your students forever. Do we want to have that? Because it's approving a policy for somebody who you get advantage from their success. To what extent do we want to mirror that, and do you want to say that? I think there isn't a recuse button on the ballot so you probably want to add that so people can literally recuse so there can be a record of recusals.
Colin doesn't remember if there's a recused button or not, but if there isn't then we need to add one [checked later: there is a recuse option]. Colin thinks the point of the student is a difficult one and he hasn't given it much thought. We should think about that.
Allison adds that in the IESG it's more difficult. Someone can be a working group chair and somebody that they worked with a long time that they feel very proprietary towards. Do they have to recuse even if they're not the same employer at the moment? Allison thinks it's much more clear in academic research, so it might be good to actually crystallize a little bit around that, kind of the way Stephen has suggested. Get something in there that this is actually comparable to research conference type recusal.
Colin thinks that's a good point, we should think about these things.
Stephen thinks there's actually more than one conflict of interest policy that the IRTF Chair needs to follow. There's like the academic style one when doing ANRW and when picking IRSG Chairs, there's much more IETF like work, and he doesn't think they're the same or needs to be the same. Stephen thinks there's a bit to figure out there, but he suspects the right answer might be that sometimes the IRTF Chair or an IRSG member organizes a workshop or something. Sometimes they should follow a typical academic conflict of interest policy where if you've written a paper with somebody in the last ten years, that you recuse. Other times if they're looking for somebody to, let's say an IRSG Chair wants somebody to write a document describing something for the research group as a bit of background then he doesn't think you have that same conflict of interest policy. Stephen thinks this document might be the place to call it all out that they exist and are different.
Colin agrees that that's a good way of thinking of it. Colin doesn't think that this document needs to go into all of that, he doesn't want to enumerate every possibility. We want to highlight the broad directions and these are things to think about to make sure things are clearly documented and do something reasonable. And here's the appeal process, if you think someone is not doing something reasonable. If we try to document every possible corner case, we will drive ourselves mad.
Stephen agrees, and thinks that this document can say that the IRTF Chair has to sometimes do this policy and sometimes do that policy; some details of those are not here somewhere.
Colin thinks that makes sense and it gives him some ideas for what to put in the next.
Dave also agrees with Stephen, the academic one also has a bunch of corner cases that probably don't apply to what we do, for example, the declaring of false conflicts is a problem in the academic publishing these days (i.e., people will declare false conflicts in order to try to prevent someone they don't like from reviewing their work) which probably doesn't apply to us.
Colin adds that a place it would apply is the ANRW but perhaps not to some of the other things we do.
Dirk thinks that ANRW should just follow the normal best practice for other conferences, he doesn't think we need to specify anything special for that one.
Colin adds that ANRP is the one that we might need to think about more carefully, but yes, ANRW basically is just the usual ACM conference and should do the usual thing.
Dirk says that if we want to go the way that Dave laid out so like having one document but with some separate sections for the different roles, so when you want avoid specifying everything to the finest detail what you could do is list some examples especially for the IRTF Chair, because you cannot possibly foresee everything and you don't want to maybe codify everything. But some things that could happen or something so that RG could take this, and consider that for their future work.
Colin thinks that makes sense, and asks how do people think we should publish this? Do we just want to iterate in this document then stick the results on the IRTF website or does he submit it as a draft and hope to eventually take this to an RFC?
Stephen chimes in and says that he doesn't recall that the IESG or IAB have produced RFCs for theirs.
Colin says that the IAB certainly just has a page on their website.
Stephen thinks that's the correct plan.
Dave thinks that's fine.
Mirja says that the website for the IAB is based on the IAB charter.
Colin asks if the conflict of interest policy in the charter?
Mirja responds, no, that one is not.
Colin asks if there is anything else on this or should we move on?
Colin starts by saying that he has been talking to a bunch of people who are thinking about applying for the IRTF Chair and that has made him think about what the IRTF was really all about and he had some notes which he originally wrote up when he was applying for this role and sort of reread them and revised them over the last few weeks, and submitted them as an Internet Draft.
Colin then asks, does what he has written seem appropriate? Is there anything he got fundamentally wrong or anything he missed and if it seems appropriate? Is it useful and does it add enough to what's already been written that it's worth developing and potentially publishing. Is it going to help the community to publish this or should he just keep it alive long enough to send to potential IRTF chair candidates over the next few weeks and then let it die? Do people have opinions on whether this is useful or not?
Dave thinks this seems like a potentially good fother for the website so people who want to learn things about the IRTF. It has good information about how, what the IRTF thinks about itself, independent of who happens to be chair, even though it's focused on who would be a good chair for the IRTF.
Colin adds that the document describes the philosophy so it might sort of help bias who wants to apply to become chair, but it is supposed to be independent of who's chairing it at any particular time.
Allison thinks that that it should be published because there's multiple older publications and they're not actually as representative of reality as they could be. Some of them are quite old and people may just legitimately doubt whether they're still operative, so she felt like it wouldn't be bad to have a current documents that updates the oldest one (RFC 2014). Allison doesn't know what people think about that point, but the fact that there are a lot there that isn't necessarily, for example, she really likes the clarify about closed-membership working groups really not being operative anymore even though you don't go so far to say that, it's a good idea. Allison had certain times where people wanted to closed-membership groups, and it would've been nice to be able to say other than just discouraging it, it would be nice to have a good document that says it's a recent view that this is no longer a reasonable thing to do.
Colin adds that if he was revising RFC 2014, that would be one of the things he would suggest to remove, but that's a different discussion; it's not the scope for this one. If we do publish as an RFC there's nothing stopping us copying and pasting the text and putting it on the website as well, it doesn't just have to live in an RFC.
Colin asks if there's anything wrong or anything he missed? There have been a couple of emails that he hasn't replied to all of them or read all of them yet, but does anyone on the call think there's anything he messed up with? Colin isn't hearing any comments so he is taking it as people think it's reasonable or at least don't object if he carries on developing it. Colin thinks he will plan for this to become an RFC and then possibly populate the website if that seems reasonable to people.
Colin starts off by saying that we had IETF 120 and ANRW which to him was a pretty big success. This is an opportunity for people to look back and if there's anything that needs to highlighted or any issues people want to raise then let's talk about anything arising from IETF 120.
(no one had anything to add)
Colin concludes that he takes it that everyone had an eventful IETF in Vancouver which is good.
Colin asks Jenny if there's an update on applications.
Jenny responds that the travel grant deadline is next Monday, and so far we have 4 applicants and one came overnight that she still needs to review, so 4 maybe 5 total. As for IETF 120 travel grants, all the reimbursements have been made so we've completed everything for that.
Colin asks that the last budget he received is pretty much accurate then? So we know how much money we have to spend. We actually have a reasonable amount, right?
Jenny responds that yes, that budget amount is correct and that the 4 applicants we received budgets from are very minimal since they reside somewhere close to Dublin.
Lixia chimes in and mentions that she has some feedback from previous awardees. They wish that the grant decision could be made early, at least two months before the IETF so that they could handle all the travel arrangements things especially, and if they're granted just one month before there may not be enough time to get the visa and the airfare is higher than if you were to make the reservation earlier. The suggestion is that we should go one IETF ahead, at this time we should look into the one after Dublin. Lixia thought this was useful input and have already reported it to Jay. Lixia doesn't know for us whether we should consider this.
Colin says that it's certainly something that has been raised a couple of times. The reason we haven't is that we often don't get the budget confirmed that far in advance, and sometimes the budget is confirmed quite late. For example, for the Brisbane meeting, the Brisbane Economic Development people didn't confirm until quite late. Colin agrees that it's a real problem and it would be nice if we could, but he isn't sure that we know how much money we have to spend far enough in advance.
Lixis adds that the end results of delaying the whole process is you spend more money and flights get a lot more expensive. Lixia suggests that Colin bring it up with some proper meetings to really consider making a change here.
Colin responds, yes, it's a problem and he will think about it but it's very difficult because of funding. Colin will talk to Stephanie about sponsorships.
(Allison from the chat: Would it make sense for the Secretariat to reserve 4-5 rooms in the IETF hotel in prospect for the travel grantees, at least to help with the hotel part? )
Jenny responds that we do currently do that, we normally reserve about 10 rooms for travel grants and whatever rooms we don't use; they get released.
Allison adds that that's a good thing so the people who went to Vancouver didn't have a problem about the hotel.
Colin says that since after we started going back after the pandemic, we've been putting the awardees into the IETF hotel block. He doesn't remember the exact date it started.
Colins starts by thanking Ignacio, Jayasree, and Simone for chairing ANRW. He thought it went really well, we got a good number of papers and thought there were some decent quality papers there.
We need to start planning for next year and one of the first decisions is to appoint the program chairs for next year. If people have suggestions for who would be a good program chair for ANRW, then please let Colin know.
The ANRP process is starting, we'll be issuing the call for nominations in a few weeks, usually mid September, so if the IRSG knows any praise worthy papers then please think about those and nominate them once the call for nominations opens. If you want to be part of the award committee that is doing the reviewing or if you want to recommend someone who you think would be a good person to serve on that award committee then again please let Colin know.This is basically like being on a conference program committee with the paper reviewing taking place just after the November IETF meeting and concluding in the middle of December just before the Christmas Holiday. Any volunteers and suggestions for volunteers would be appreciated for both ANRW chair and ANRP award committee members.
Colin says this is just a reminder that the call for nominations are open for another couple of weeks and if you know anyone who you think would be a good IRTF candidate, please encourage them to apply and Colin would be very happy to talk to anyone who's considering about it, and what's involved and try to encourage them how to do that.
We've had one official nomination so far, and Colin has spoken to, or is about to speak to, another 5 people, so there are at least some potential nominees, but if we can find more that's generally a good thing. Colin adds that someone come take his job, it's someone else's turn and adds that Allison has the look that says she actually well understands that.
Allison responds that she didn't do as long as Colin, but it's a big job.
Colin agrees that it's a big job but it's a worthwhile job.
Allison agrees that it's a lovely job, and she actually had a number of people asking her about it too and she encouraged people to nominate themselves.
Colin says there's an RFC which talks about what's involved [RFC7827] and he went through his list and calendar for the last few years and tried to summarize and categorize what he did. So there's a page on the wiki which is linked from the IAB call for nominations which just lists everything in the site that Colin has done over the past few years. It helps give people a feel for what's involved.