> From: grenville armitage <garmitage@xxxxxxxxxxx> > ... > then that's a problem we can fix without creating an indestructable I-Ds. > ... IETF rules to the contrary, I-Ds are indestructable for anyone who cares to look for them. Every several months I'm moved to point to classic I-Ds that should have been destroyed as proof that almost anyone can submit an I-D that says almost anything, no matter how...ah...controversial. I have never failed to find copies somewhere on the net. Today the only aspect of an I-D that expires after 6 months is the endorsement implicit in a copy at venera.isi.edu or www.ietf.org. Today an endorsement of some sort is the only difference between having your ideas heard by self-publishing and having them officially published. The web is taking us a major step forward to 400 or 500 years ago when good ideas were self-published and readers didn't need the moderation of a Rupert Murdoch or the IETF. I don't know what the academic publish-or-perish, RIAA, and other commercial and mass media worlds will do to replace their citation indecies, royalties, and advertising revenues, and I don't much care. I'm not saying anything against WGs producing Informational RFCs. I'm only pointing out that calls to have the IETF Mission Statement "broaden the scope and quantity of documents to be published" suggest ignorance of search engines or needs to have things endorsed by the IETF. ] From: Fred Baker <fred@xxxxxxxxx> ] I don't know that we're changing anything in what the IETF does. What is ] happening is that the IETF is growing up and taking control of its own ] destiny in a variety of ways, and trying to clean up its own processes. In ] all the *other* problems it tries to solve, the IETF tries to say what ] problem it is solving sometime before finishing solving it, if for no other ] reason so that it can decide whether it did in fact solve it. Same here. The facilitators hired by H-R departments to run mission statement "off-sites" always say all of that. They are always perfectly sincere and well meaning. Those good intentions do not change the fact that trying to write a mission statement changes the organization. If an organization lacks an unstated consensus purpose, then writing a mission statement is unlikely to create one. On the other hand, trying to write one exposes any lack of consensus and turns into a race to the Dilbert Standard of advocating all virtues, condemning all vices, and creating new mandates such as "ad hoc WGs" and "archived I-Ds." You could be right and I might be wrong if much this thread were not filled with talk about turning the IETF an unfunded Reed Elsevier. ] ... ] Once we have decided that we did in fact solve the problem before us, I ] don't know that the bumper sticker gets us all that much further. But the ] bumper sticker can be helpful when we are asking the questions "what are we ] trying to accomplish?" and "are we accomplishing it?". It's one thing to consider those questions and something else to write a "mission statement." Mission statement facilitators always say the only purpose is to consider those to questions, but the results are what they always are. Those results are related to the fact that they're officiously titled "Mission Statements" instead of "ad hoc comments about what we're trying to do and how well we're doing it." I know many of you must have been through Mission Statement charades. Have you ever seen one that with 12 months hindsight was not a waste of time or worse? My personal experience suggests that "write a mission statement" means the same as "jump the shark." See http://www.google.com/search?q=%22jump+the+shark%22 Vernon Schryver vjs@xxxxxxxxxxxx