JORDI PALET MARTINEZ via ripe-list wrote on 07/02/2021 13:05:
Briefly, in several situation I've written policy proposals, and the chairs of the WG, tried to convince me to not publish it, or actually decided not to publish it, or delayed it.
Jordi, without prejudice to any of the proposals that you've submitted to various working groups over the years, one of the jobs of a working group chair is to make a call on whether or not a proposal is suitable for their working group. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the one of the generally accepted responsibilities of any chair is to ensure functional communication within a group and ensuring that the communication within the group is relevant and on-topic. So, a chair is within their rights to decline to take on a proposal if they feel it's unlikely to achieve consensus, or if it's been discussed extensively already without consensus, or if it contains - in their opinion - proposals which would be highly unlikely to gain consensus, or if they feel that the proposal was inappropriate or out of scope for their particular working group, and so on. In other words, regardless of whether or not it's stated explicitly in the PDP, the WG chair has leeway to accept or reject a proposal, as they see fit. If a RIPE WG chair rejects a proposal, the PDP allows the proposer to forward the proposal to the RIPE Chair. This would trigger an examination of the WG chair's decision. External review always causes us to examine our actions more seriously, so it seems unlikely that a WG chair would reject a proposal lightly, as they can be held to account for their decision. Incidentally, the duty to manage discussion isn't something specific to RIPE WG chairs - it's a general accepted principle about the rights and responsibilities of all chairs, regardless of what they're chairing. There's nothing unusual about the RIPE WG chair duties in this respect. Nick