On 10/26/22 8:44 PM, Tim Bray wrote:
My conclusion remains the opposite - proceed with the action, even if I agree that this runs the risk of losing input from a valuable contributor. My reasoning is that that potential loss is dwarfed by the loss of contributions from multiple other people who walk away from groups where they encounter behavior that they perceive as abusive.
The IETF has definitely lost some very valuable contributors who've left because of the general tenor of the discourse - people who've authored successful protocols that have seen very wide deployment. But I also have to believe that progress is possible and that people can adapt in order to find ways to work together. And, I tend to think that even if, say, this particular situation never arose, the far-too-widely shared (and instantiated) sentiment that it's okay to treat other participants with disrespect would have driven them off, anyway. That said, I think the IETF has a major process problem, as questions like these really are not at all amenable to to consensus processes. As others have pointed out, it's pretty ugly to put the person who's the subject of the proposed PR action through this. It's also the case that consensus doesn't scale to this number of participants and just doesn't work at all when some participants are acting in bad faith. Regardless of the outcome here I think it may be time for some serious discussions about how to deal with these questions in a way that causes less damage. Melinda -- Melinda Shore melinda.shore@xxxxxxxxx Software longa, hardware brevis -- last-call mailing list last-call@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/last-call
