On Wed, 24 Aug 2022, Keith Moore wrote:
I was talking about my own experience. I'm not trying to contradict or discredit others' experiences. When newcomers say they're seeing such hostility, I believe they're being sincere.
It's more than "being sincere". They are right in what they see as that
is their perception. Your opinion does not change theirs.
Nor does theirs change mine. But in my experience, "rudeness" is highly subjective, and nowhere nearly universal.
For example, what I've seen consistently throughout my life is
that people think you're being rude when they think you don't
"know your place". They assume that behavior should be governed
by a dominance hierarchy, and the people who refuse to adhere to
that hierarchy (say, by disagreeing with those seen as having
higher status) are seen as rude.
Such a hierarchy is detrimental to consensus-making, and has
absolutely no place in IETF. Yes, people with appointed
positions have jobs to do and participants should not try to keep
them from doing their jobs. But everyone should feel free to
respectfully disagree even with those people as long as their
disagreement is sincere.
And that anti-pattern is so common that I don't take others' perceptions of rudeness as axiomatically valid. I think they're sincere but not necessary correct. Particularly when they're newcomers to consensus-based decision-making.
Of course, different people witnessing the same interaction can come to different conclusions about it without either person being wrong.
The word "can" does a lot of work here. In general, the behaviour we are
talking about does in fact seem to be that one of the persons is wrong.
I don't get that at all, and I strongly suspect that the "wrong" here is in the assumption that you're stating.
These days I'm not seeing much content at all on the IETF list, rude or otherwise.
Which was a direct result of the hostility on the list.
IMO it was a direct result of prolonged efforts to make the IETF
list irrelevant and dilute the community's ability to set its own
standards.
Again, you are making an unsubstantiated claim of "concerted effort". I
can assure you I did not leave as part of an effort. I left because I
was tired of the hostility towards efforts to make the IETF less hostile
(the hrpc draft discussion about being more inclusive and avoiding
certain words discussion).
Those were, in my sincere opinion, efforts to make IETF more
hostile and less tolerant and impose draconian and unproductive
constraints on discussion, or if I'm being as charitable as
possible, to replace one kind of prejudice with another kind
that's equally arbitrary and myopic. I'm all for being more
inclusive, but those were not efforts at inclusion. IMO.
I do recognize that there's room for differences of opinion here.
But I don't feel compelled to pretend like I support efforts that
I sincerely believe will do considerable harm. Nor do I believe
anyone else should feel so compelled.
It's that too many people seem to feel entitled to suppress the inputsI have not seen this happen. I are you saying these valuable contributors
of those with whom they disagree, using any excuse whatsoever other than
a technical argument, or maybe no excuse at all, or any means at their
disposal.
have been silenced because they couldn’t rephrase their technical content
in emails without the word “stupid” in it?
Not at all (where did I say that?) Of course, that would be unfortunate even if that were the case.
It is implied, because the moderation has not been about technical
content, but about presentation of that technical content.
But the moderation is also ostensibly about how to constructively deal with people seen as "rude". What I've seen over and over again is that "rudeness" is a vague and arbitrary standard, and people will use "rudeness" (or perception of rudeness) in order to shoot down people and proposals that they don't like, for reasons having nothing to do with the merit of those people's contributions. Such efforts don't contribute to good decision-making and may actually sabotage it; at best, they distract from it.
And the efforts of the Tone Police have not been confined to the IETF list.
I'm not able to read the minds of the people whose work is being shut down,
Whose work is being shut down? A person who got their posting rights
restricted for two weeks as warning for targetting insults at
individuals and groups?
The harm done by such draconian sanctions is much greater than
denying a single person the right to post for two weeks.
If you want to build consensus, you need to be willing to listen
even when it's difficult to do so. If you don't want to build
consensus, what are you doing in IETF? (it's a rhetorical
question; I don't expect an answer)
As for the technical work that's been shut down in the past, I'm
not going to relitigate arguments about old technical proposals
here. Those waters have long since passed under their respective
bridges and in most cases it's far too late to fix any of the harm
that I believe has been done. The anti-pattern still persists,
though, so I will do what I can to try to thwart it.
Those people can come back in two weeks and try
again to present their technical arguments in an IETF inclusive way. I'm
more than happy to help such individuals with formulating words to help
them.
We're talking about entirely different things now. But the
problem is not, in general, that people have presented their
technical arguments poorly (or more poorly than other
participants). It is that others can use accusations of rudeness,
or other impropriety, to shut down technical discussion. It's a
DoS attack.
and the people doing the shutting down usually don't state their reasons.
I thought moderators were pretty clear about why, and they are following
a very clear RFC process.
That's part of the problem, after all.
Please elaborate ?
When people use accusations of rudeness to shut down technical
discussion, it is precisely because they don't want to
engage in the discussion on technical merits, and they don't
want to explain their reasons for sabotaging the discussion.
Their very purpose is to sabotage someone else's technical
proposal without explaining why.
Part of working with a diverse group on protocols is being good at
communicating, in writing drafts but also in interacting with others in a
positive and constructive way.
People have a wide variety of skills and communications styles, and people can make valuable contributions to protocols even if others don't judge them "good" at communicating.
I can judge someone "good" at swimming when they drown. That does not
make them objectively good swimmers. There is also a difference between
"not good" and "repeatedly ignoring requests to stop certain verbal behaviour".
Again, we're talking about different things now.
My point, which I probably did not communicate well, is that such accusations
kind of need some more objective evidence for your claims to be taken into
account. Right now, it can only be interpreted as subjective hearsay.
Well, that's politics for you. Sometimes you have to try to get along (or at least avoid fighting) with people who have (metaphorically) stabbed you in the back.
But the structural problem, that people can use arbitrary rules
for behavior to sabotage technical discussion for no good reason,
should be self-evident.
One such possible step would be to go through the ombuds office we have.
My last experience with that office convinced me that it's,
unfortunately, useless and perhaps even counterproductive to use
them. Maybe they've changed since I last needed them, but my
experience didn't give me confidence in those structures and I
would hesitate to recommend them to others.
And that's the reason I started calling out people's demands for
"professional" behavior, because I'd seen too many occasions when that
demand was used as an excuse to distract from technical discussion rather
than contribute to it.
So far, I have seen none.
I wasn't claiming to speak for you, nor was I claiming that this is happening in every working group. I'm speaking of several years' worth of history.
Can you point to one or two examples on the list archives of one of
these WGs?
I don't know if I could do that, even if I invested the
considerable effort required to find the details after several
years. My recollection is that significant parts of one
discussion in particular occurred at in-person working group
meetings, and that the minutes did not adequately capture the
discussion. (as is often the case, but what do you expect from
volunteers?) I tried to raise the technical issue with IESG at
the time, but the relevant ADs didn't understand the technical
issues and really weren't qualified to provide the kind of
technical oversight needed.
There have been other discussions as well that were shut down for
no good reasons, but again, I don't think there's any purpose to
be served by relitigating them now. It's been too long, the harm
has been done, and some of the people involved are no longer in
the loop anyway. I did try to use available process remedies at
the normally prescribed times, but the results just convinced me
of the same flaws I'm expressing concern about here. (I do not
however claim that process remedies are never useful; sometimes in
my experience they have been useful.)
Again, personally until I joined the IESG, I had some of these “rude”
people in my /dev/null redirection, so your assumption that rude people
should be allowed to be rude for technical merit still seems to fall short
- there is a higher chance of their merit being heard if they are in fact,
not insulting individuals or groups.
Please don't try to put words in my mouth. (That's both rude and insulting.) There's a huge difference between arguing that "rude people should be allowed" and arguing that tolerance is overall a virtue, and that vague rules for behavior and arbitrary enforcement of such rules are harmful to consensus building. The very idea (implied) that "rude" people should (not) be allowed is within epsilon of pure prejudice, and is IMO indefensible.
Your argument that "tolerance is a virtue" was something you accepted was
not successfull based on for example the newcomer feedback.
Newcomers are not the sole arbiters of what is constructive, particularly in an organization that they do not yet understand, and a practice of consensus-building that is likely alien to them. (unless, say, they're long time Quakers or members of some other group that routinely tries to foster consensus, in which case we should be asking them for advice.)
It's good to get feedback from newcomers, bad to let such
feedback dictate policy. If anything such feedback shows how we
could do a better job at educating newcomers.
And the organization treats those people as if they're entirelyCould it be that you are in fact in the rough of rough consensus, and that
legitimate, even promoting some of them to positions of leadership.
people who promote inclusiveness and professional behaviour are in fact
the kind of people that our organization wants to see in leadership roles?
No. People shutting down technical discussions without giving reasons are not behaving inclusively or "professionally" (which is after all another form of arbitrary prejudice), but quite the opposite.
Let me be more direct that earlier in this email. Please present
evidence to the list, to the ombuds office or via some other way. But
just repeating yourself without presenting evidence is not helpful.
You're just repeating yourself without support for your
position. Is that helpful? But I agree that looping serves no
useful purpose.
To be clear, your cleam that people shutting down technical discussions
and that those people have been doing so in an "consorted effort" and
have attained leadership positions against the IETF community consensus
implies an elite small group hacked our entire nomcom procedure that
elects those leadership positions.
Not exactly. I do claim that sometimes the leadership has hacked procedures for determining community consensus, in order to impose a result on the community. I haven't tried to review the most recent moderator policy but I note that those were not vetted by community consensus. Gendispatch itself was quite transparently an effort to hide substantive discussions from the wider community, to reduce the power of those opposing changes that the then-leaders wanted to make, and to dismantle the traditional plenary function of the IETF list. I've always objected to it for that reason, but by now the damage has been done and it's probably too late to fix it.
Keith
