On 8/14/20 10:30 AM, Christian Huitema wrote:
On 8/14/2020 9:44 AM, Eric Rescorla wrote:
Thanks Paul. Well, said.
Despite the long history of the IETF discussion list being awful, I've
felt an obligation to stay on it. However, it has now become so bad
that I can longer do so.
I would like to thank the IESG for creating the last call list so
that it is still possible to participate in the business of the IETF
without being part of this toxic environment. I'll see you there
and in the WGs.
There is something systemic here. We see that behavior too many times. I
was at the receiving end of similar abuses during the RFC-ED discussions
last year and I feel the pain for Alissa, but there are many more
examples. The IETF list functions as some kind of general assembly, but
without any rules of order. The loudest voices dominate the stream and
skew the consensus, which encourages a loudest-voice behavior and
discourages consensus building.
The question is, what to do?
How about nothing? All these public "I'm leaving" emails have one thing
in common: they say they're going to go back and focus on technology and
the good work done in working groups. So hurray for that! We should all do
that.
This language policing exercise with draft-knodel-terminology and the
IESG
statement is a huge distraction.
Culture changes organically, not by diktats from on high. If IETF
language
is going to change it will change because we all start speaking differently
in our interactions with others and it will change gradually over time.
Let's go back to writing good technical documents describing good
protocols.
We can all use a reminder that our target audience is global and we should
avoid idioms which tend to translate poorly. But no one is hurting
anyone else
by using state of the art terminology (like "master key") and we don't
need to
come up with new ways to describe these things.
Fundamentally, we don't have a problem with language in RFCs so we don't
need to "fix" that which is not broken. We might have a problem with abusive
language on mailing lists (guilty as charged) but that's different and it is
best solved differently.
regards,
Dan.
