[arin-ppml] AC candidates

[Owen DeLong]

> On Oct 26, 2023, at 09:44, William Herrin <bill at herrin.us> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Oct 26, 2023 at 9:42 AM John Curran <jcurran at arin.net> wrote:
>>> On Oct 26, 2023, at 12:20 PM, William Herrin <bill at herrin.us> wrote:
>>> It plummeted after the Board changed the AC's role from shepherding
>>> policy proposals to developing policy proposals.
>> 
>> There is no material change in the role of the ARIN AC in this regard –
>> although I do agree that the role of the ARIN AC in shepherding policies
>> has been made clearer with subsequent updates to the ARIN Policy
>> Development Process (PDP).
> 
> Hi John,
> 
> That's just not accurate. I forget the name of the process that
> preceded the PDP, but the introduction of the PDP fundamentally and
> IMO destructively changed the AC's role.

I think you’re referring to the Internet Resources Policy Evaluation Process (IRPEP).

However, I think you are misremembering things rather substantially… Under the IRPEP,
the AC had a relatively free hand to reject proposals in their infancy and there was
considerably less protection available to the proposal author or the community.

This carried over into the first version of the PDP, and the AC’s escalating use of
that ability was significantly reigned in in the next version of the PDP as a result.

Under the current PDP (and at least 2 previous versions), the AC can only reject
a proposal prior to making it a draft policy if it is out of scope of the PDP or lacks
a clear problem statement. Even in those cases, the AC is required to make a good
faith effort to wrork with the author(s) to resolve those defects.

Once a policy is a draft policy, it’s published and open for community discussion.
The AC cannot abandon it without a substantial majority vote (IIRC it takes at
least 8 members of the AC voting in favor of abandonment, regardless of the
number of AC members present in the meeting). The AC must further provide
a reason for such abandonment to the community.

As John stated, if the community has any level of disagreement with the AC’s
actions in such a case, the petition process is quite easy to exercise.

To the best of my knowledge, only a handful of abandoned proposals or
draft policies have ever been successfully petitioned and of those, I don’t
recall a single example which went on to become policy.

I know taking pot shots at the PDP and the AC is one of your favorite
hobbies, but I think you’re a bit off base on this one.

Owen