Summary

  • The proposal requires three qualified supporters for a full-body IESG or IAB review; version 02 deletes its express option to consider a case with fewer.
  • Those supporters carry over if the appeal reaches the IAB, so the draft puts recruitment at the first gate instead of starting it again at escalation.

An appeal to the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), which manages the IETF standards process, or to the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), which hears appeals from IESG decisions, would start with a count: three qualified supporters. Version 02 removes the draft’s express option to hear a full-body case with fewer, but lets the original supporters carry over when an appellant moves from the IESG to the IAB.

The proposal is draft-eggert-appeal-support-02, updated on 30 October. The Datatracker lists it as an active individual Internet-Draft with IESG state “I-D Exists”; it has no stream, telechat date or responsible Area Director. The page says an individual draft is not endorsed by the IETF and has no formal standing in its standards process.

The change history is unusually plain about the main edit. Revision 01 let the body handling an appeal either decline a case with too few supporters or consider it anyway. Revision 02 deletes that express choice. The earlier version also required an appellant who escalated from the IESG to the IAB to find another set of qualified supporters. Version 02 says the original supporters count at the higher body too.

The proposed gate applies when an appeal reaches the IESG or IAB as a whole, not during the earlier discussion with a working-group chair, an Area Director or the IESG Chair. The draft calls for three active IETF participants who meet the eligibility criteria in RFC 9389. Their messages must reach the appeal-handling body within two weeks after it receives the appeal. An appellant could send one request to one directly relevant public IETF list, or to the general list; the supporters would file their own messages directly. The appellant need not qualify for NomCom, although an eligible appellant could support their own appeal once. Here, support means asking the body to review the matter; it does not mean endorsing the appellant’s position.

One seam remains in the text: RFC 2026 section 6.5.4 gives decision-makers discretion to define appeal procedures, and revision 02 does not explain how that general discretion fits with its deleted below-threshold option. The source record also gives no count of appeals that would fail the proposed threshold.

The proposal concentrates the organizing work at the first full-body review: find three qualified supporters, then keep that group if the case goes to the IAB. The published record gives no count of appeals that would miss the proposed threshold.

Sources