> Why do you think a decent-sized, randomly-selected subset of > the IETF (i.e. the NomComm) are taking actions that are > substantially more conservative (in terms of keeping people) > than the IETF as a whole would do? Because they only get to do it once and have no expectation of repeating. > The *whole point* of the > NomComm is for it to have roughly the same views as the IETF > as a whole, except in a smaller body. So what makes you think > that were the IETF as a whole making the decisions, they'd be > any different? The people whoe wrote the constitution certainly thought that there would be a difference. Otherwise they would have done it the obvious way. > > Why do engineers believe that they are experts in innovating > > organizations? Is the result an improvement over traditional > > arrangements that have been incrementally improved over > centuries? > > I find this comment particularly hilarious, in view of the > fact that an important part of the inspiration for the whole > NomComm process was the Athenian Constitution of 508 BC; in > particular, the mechanism for the selection of the Boule (the > Council of Five Hundred), which was the chief executive organ > of the state. As I said, ignoring the 2,500 years of experience since that date. Moreover the Athenian constitution was not exactly a success, they murdered Socrates, got whacked in the Peleponesian war and finaly got whacked by the Romans. Given the fragmentary nature of classical accounts I find it astonishing that you would think that you could understand the dynamics of the organizations at all, let alone whether they were satisfactory. Most of the accounts were written by the people whose interests were served by those arrangements. The one dissenting voice, Plato provides a critique so devastating that the same experiment is not tried again for two millenia. > As you will perhaps recall, this constitution was in itself > the result of several hundred years of tinkering with > democratic systems for use in small societies with direct > democracies (i.e. a very different environment from today's > mass representative democracies, with their millions of members). The only large scale organization I know of that has anything similar is the Socialist Workers Party - and for similar reasons, it allows the politburo to keep talking about decentralization and grass roots power while keeping power firmly concentrated in the hands of an elite. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf