The response below misrepresents the situation completely. Henrik was working on the new RFC tooling for the HTML format. From what I see, most participants approve of what they see as improvements.
The issue that I see pervasively in IETF is a system in which people have authority but not accountability. So people insist on being the one to make a decision that they can never take because there is no clear indication of what participants want.
There is a reason the IETF approach is not copied by any other organization: It doesn't work. Organization of RFC tools process is particularly convoluted because in addition to the usual IETF denial of the obvious, there is the additional pretense of the RFC system supporting multiple independent organizations.
This approach is going to be particularly unsuccessful when you are employing people to work within it. The employees have no clear lines of reporting. They will naturally feel they should be responsive to the whole community, not just the IAB or the chair. But there are no mechanisms that allow the whole community to provide direction.
A good start would be to recognize some obvious facts:
1) IETF participants SHOULD be treated as if they are members. Telling people they are not members is silly and insulting. If you want an inclusive organization, you treat people as members. Amex treats me as a member, why can't IETF?
2) The RFC formats and publications serve the IETF community which includes participants in IETF, IRTF and everything else. Nothing set the process up for unnecessary pain so much as the notion that 'because RFCs are published by more than just the IETF' the process should not be an IETF one.
3) If there is a point to what we are doing here, we are building the future. Over the past 25 years, this organization has been the vanguard of political and social changes that have created and destroyed tens of millions of jobs. A veteran journalist who has lost their job multiple times as the century old local papers they worked for has closed might have a rather uncharitable response to people complaining that they can't work in nroff. You can't build the 2020s living in the 1970s.
On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 9:40 AM Masataka Ohta <mohta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Lloyd W wrote:
> I'm becoming convinced that these incidents (losses of experienced
> RFC Editor and tools contract work) are examples of managing for
> short-term overheads and cost savings, rather than for longer-term
> organizational needs and growth.
I disagree.
Those incidents should be caused by people who want to change
perfectly working situations toward worst possible situations,
because they want to say that they have performed some work.
Masataka Ohta
