Summary

  • Randy Bush's February 2003 APNIC presentation identified engineers and other stakeholders missing from a policy process that could bring a proposal to a small meeting only a week before a decision.
  • APNIC subsequently adopted a formal process: written proposals one month before the meeting, confirmation at the member meeting, eight weeks for comments afterward and final Executive Council confirmation. Bush had asked for a still stronger role for mailing lists.

The most revealing slide in Bush's APNIC 15 presentation was headed “Stakeholders are Missing”. He was talking about protocol designers, backbone architects and router engineers. The Asia Pacific region was too large, too varied and too expensive to cross for a meeting room to stand in for everyone affected by an address policy. Some of the people absent from that room might not even know a proposal was coming.

Bush identified the mechanism. A policy text could turn up a week before a face-to-face meeting of a small group, and the meeting could decide it. His alternative was deliberate friction: full written proposals, advance notice, mailing lists as the principal decision forum and roughly 60 days after the last major change. Meetings would test and explain arguments. They would cease to be the place where mere presence closed the matter.

The APNIC 15 minutes show the room accepted part of the challenge. Participants wanted full proposal text and more discussion on mailing lists after meetings. Late proposals could be discussed, with a decision waiting until the next meeting. The Secretariat was told to draft a formal process. That was a concrete shift in the location of a policy's deadline, prompted by a critique of the room's own reach.

The next step has an authorship detail worth keeping. APNIC's prop-001 record lists the Secretariat as formal author. Bush supplied the public challenge; Anne Lord and Bush are credited in APNIC's later history with developing the reform. It became active after Executive Council endorsement in December 2003. Calling it Bush's solo policy would miss the institution that wrote and enacted the rule.

What did the final rule buy? The APNIC 16 minutes set out written proposals a month before the meeting, confirmation of SIG consensus at the member meeting, an eight-week post-meeting comment window that could be extended, and Executive Council confirmation at the end. Bush's proposed 60-day reset after every major change and his idea that meetings should never bind were not adopted as written. APNIC gave absentees time and text, while preserving a decisive role for the meeting and the council.

The distinction matters when someone says a room reached consensus. A microphone measures who spoke there; a comment period records who could object afterward. Neither record by itself identifies everyone who would bear the policy's cost. The 2003 minutes contain no participation audit showing that the missing engineers subsequently joined the discussion. Such a record would change how far the new clock can be credited with reaching beyond the chairs.