Re: Describing which behavior is appropriate or not (was: Last Call: <draft-eggert-bcp45bis-06.txt> (IETF Discussion List Charter) to Best Current Practice)

["Bron Gondwana" <brong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Keith,

This is a really excellent message - and I really appreciate your description of "appearance-conscious".  Thankfully I didn't grow up in a religious school, but I know people (in person) who had similar experiences to yours.  "Appearance-conscious" groups tend towards dysfunction and in-group misbehaviour.

It is much easier to see this in people in other people than in ourselves - and if I reflect on myself, I do notice that I am more willing to give the benefit of the doubt to people who I mostly agree with as well.

That's probably the key thing that identity focused people have partly right... and in the context of the IETF I'm sure we have blind spots where we're more willing to accept kind of dodgy work from people who speak "engineering-language" well enough to create a compelling narrative.

BUT - that doesn't mean that we should try to change the narratives we focus on, it means we should try harder to find the underlying "stuff that actually works" that science and engineering are supposed to be based on.  And if "based on reality and what actually works" is exclusionary - that's a good exclusionary and we should embrace it.

And then there's the other half of identity / diversity which is "different people have different needs, and the IETF will naturally focus on the needs of the people who are here".  That's a whole another challenge because the IETF does need to have some degree of focus and scope.

An organisation that doesn't have that tries to be the "everything to everybody" organisation, which leads to a place that gets nothing done and creates no value.  But an IETF which is just the in-club for Western engineers with a few particular hobbies also misses a lot of valuable voices, and an IETF which changed to become an in-club for different voices of a slightly different group of Western social-engineers with a different set of hobbies wouldn't be any better.  We need a balance for sure.

...

So back to the topic:

What can we do here?  We need to find SOME wording that gives a (to use a sports metaphor) "play the ball, not the player" - and have a SAA who can give you a timeout if you start kicking a player rather than kicking the ball.

I'm not sure I'm seeing an answer in this thread yet which compels me more than "unprofessional" or "uncivil".  Is there a word for "focusing on a proxy for the issue rather than the actual issue", or "repeating the same thing over and over without listening to, or by mis-characterising, responses" because that's often what I see underlying poor behaviour on our IETF lists, and we do need some boundary on what's allowed.

Cheers,

Bron.

On Fri, Nov 5, 2021, at 00:44, Keith Moore wrote:

On 11/4/21 12:13 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:

> but Keith comes from a locale where that particular tactic and in 

> particular the term 'unprofessional' is frequently employed as pretext 

> for preventing dismantling of things most people thought were 

> dismantled in the 1960s.

Offhand, I don't recall the word "unprofessional" being used this way in 

my "locale".

But I was raised in an area (Nashville, Tennessee) that was very 

appearance-conscious, and I attended a religious school that was very 

appearance-conscious, staffed by people who were very 

appearance-conscious.   By the time I was 12 or so it was obvious to me 

that those people cared much more about appearance than reality.   They 

were viciously critical of anyone who did not walk the walk and talk the 

talk and dress in the very conservative manner common to their religious 

sect, often labeling them "sinners" and implying that they were damned 

for eternity.    The verse most quoted by them was "Abstain from all 

appearance of evil".   At the same time, they would overlook the actual 

behavior of anyone who did keep up appearances, giving them the benefit 

of the doubt unless and until the evidence against them was overwhelming.

So yes, that had a profound effect on me, so much that I gave up a 

scholarship at Vanderbilt University and attended a state-supported 

school instead, at least partially because I didn't want anything to do 

with Nashville or Nashville culture anymore.

One of the things that I used to really like about IETF when I got 

involved circa 1990, was that it mostly eschewed the trappings of 

professionalism.   People didn't care much who you were or who you 

worked for or where you were from, they cared about whether you knew 

what you were talking about and made useful contributions.   Which 

seemed to me then, and now, to be exactly how they should be.

Another positive aspect about IETF of that time that stood out was the 

community's tolerance of different points-of-view and different kinds of 

personalities.

By contrast, today, we have people advocating intolerance, and insisting 

that IETF must become intolerant of certain people in order to make IETF 

seem more attractive to intolerant people.   I do not hold with that 

view, and it unpleasantly reminds me of the hypocrisy of the environment 

in which I was raised and schooled. From recent private mail I 

understand that some would not only call such language "uncivil 

behavior", they would advocate censorship of individuals using it.

To me that advocation of censorship, and the efforts to marginalize 

certain people, are uncivil in the extreme, and I wish people would stop it.

For IETF to function properly, its participants need to be able to speak 

their minds.    People are only free to speak their minds on any subject 

in an environment that is radically open to speech.   I agree that 

there's some need for comity, and I'm fine with rules that prohibit 

insulting of other participants.   But censorship needs to be extremely 

rare, not used as a mechanism to make less tolerant people feel more 

comfortable.

I will not defend descriptions like "stupid" and "garbage" when 

describing a protocol, because I think criticism of a protocol is pretty 

much unhelpful unless a reader can use it to evaluate whether some 

change or other protocol would suit the critic better.   But I don't 

believe that such descriptions are insulting or uncivil.   To the 

contrary, I think it's necessary that we be able to criticize protocols, 

even in extreme terms sometimes.

I also think it's necessary that we be able to criticize companies, even 

in extreme terms sometimes, though again it's more helpful if the 

critics say specifically why the company is being criticized.   But 

predatory companies are unfortunately part of the landscape that we 

inhabit, and we do the Internet community a disservice if we refuse to 

recognize the elephants in the room out of some misguided sense of 

"civility" or "professionalism". IETF cannot do its job properly if it 

acts as if it owes fealty to these companies.

What would not be acceptable to me would be using a participant's 

employer as a means of disparaging that participant.   Everyone has to 

decide for themselves what compromises between doing what's ideal or 

right, and doing what puts food on the table, they're willing to 

accept.   We need to respect others' decisions, and realize that there 

are good people who are are still trying to do what's right as best they 

can, even when their employers may be doing tremendous harm.

And that's another reason why we need to expect individual participants 

to use their own best technical judgment, and treat them as if they are 

doing so (even though we know that's not always the case) unless there's 

very good reason to believe otherwise.

Keith

--

  Bron Gondwana, CEO, Fastmail Pty Ltd

  brong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx