[address-policy-wg] 2023-04 Who do I speak for?

Hi,

On Mon, Oct 16, 2023 at 09:09:47PM +0200, denis walker wrote:
> Another interesting observation is that before the current chairs of
> the DB-WG, ALL previous chairs only ever signed any email with their
> first name. None of them ever signed anything 'as' a co-chair. Looking
> at other mailing lists, including this AP-WG, most chairs
> intermittently sign emails (at least on their own list) with or
> without the chair title suffix. Again this goes back to the beginning
> of time. So there doesn't seem to be any convention on how chairs sign
> emails. Maybe I'll just sign with my name (as many others do), then I
> can't be criticised for wearing the wrong hat.

I've had to decide what to put under my name a few times in the last
years...  one part of it was "inside 'my' working group" (then AP) - I
tried to only sign as "APWG chair" when it was in the formal role
("call to order", "summarize a discussion", "announce something"),
and putting something else there, like "speaking as LIR contact", when
expressing my more personal opinions, based on experience in that role.

More interesting is "taking part in a different working group's decision"
- there is good reason for "speaking up as WG chair of another WG", like
"my WG tasked me to bring across a WG position" or "from experience in
our WG, I can offer some advice" - but for me, this always was exceptional,
and when I took part in a debate of personal opionions, I tried to leave
the WG out of it ("I do not know what my WG wants, so I cannot speak
for them")...

But you're right this has never been formalized - and I'm not sure it
can be done easily.  WGs are different, people are different, personalities
are.

Gert Doering
        -- frequent mailing list poster
-- 
have you enabled IPv6 on something today...?

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