Hi, [ObDisclaimer: employed by ISOC as CEO. Not their/an official opinion, just mine.] On Fri, Jun 05, 2020 at 09:35:57PM -0400, John C Klensin wrote:
in ordinary ways. I also don't believe there is anything in the LLC documents that permits the LLC, or its contractors or appointees, to say "this is an emergency and hence we get to make changes to the standards process especially if those are just consequences of other decisions".
I think we are in complete agreement about that. To be clear, my remarks about managing the LLC had much more to do with observations about how t-shirts should be allocated or delivered or even made, whether there should be early/standard/late registration, and so on. I thought we had agreement as part of IASA2 that these are just things the staff are supposed to decide. Checking with the community is correct. Debates with the Executive Director on the IETF list are not, if I understood the consensus then (noting that I was not then judging and do not now wish to judge it).
(1) The IETF has had a practice (I'd claim a principle) that people are allowed to observe sessions in real time, without identifying themselves or paying a fee, since "observe" meant audio-only and multicast.
In this case, we may be running up against realities of history and what was feasible. I was certainly not around at the time of the earliest IETFs (my first was 64), but are you really asserting that the IETF _always_ allowed anyone to go into any meeting without "joining" in some sense? I thought the point of the "decisions on the mailing list" was to avoid this problem? This is not to discount the issue that continues to plague the IETF about how decisions are actually made. Still: a more-asynchronous and more-distributed form of work such as is being forced again on the IETF might actually be salubrious. It encourages the mode of decision-making that includes people not actually in the room at a moment, even if mailing lists are not the ultimate mode by which such decisions ought to be made. (I think those are separate questions, much as I personally like mailing lists as a mode of operation.)
(2) The IETF has never charged for active remote participation, even when someone remote was asking questions via Jabber (or its predecessors) or having audio (and sometimes video) piped into the room so they could present.
But this way of describing the topic requires "the [real] room" and "the remote" as distinct entities, with one of them the preferred one and one a degenerate case. One might just as easily cast this case as, "Remote participation as a degenerate case is, for exigent reasons, over: everyone gets the same experience." In that case, it's not that "remote participants" are losing something, but that there is no class, "remote participants". In other words, the flattening of the participation space into a single class means that everyone has to pay the same ticket, or not be in. (Again, to be clear, I don't personally have an opinion about how this ought to go -- I'm not really a useful attendee in any case. These are just my personal observations.) Best regards, A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
