At 14:16 03/08/2005, Spencer Dawkins wrote:
I am sure large corporations would be more careful at sending their
high-order IQ if they known that their inputs will tagged with the
company name.
What a wonderful world it would be, if that were true...
I'm pretty sure that less than 0.001 percent of the management teams at my
IETF sponsors since 1996 had any idea that I was even ATTENDING the IETF,
and our process documents point out repeatedly that it's not necessary to
actually attend IETF face-to-face meetings in order to participate in the IETF.
My current sponsor is quite clear that I am, and will be, participating in
the IETF, but that's not true for most of the people I talk to on IETF
mailing lists. It's quite possible to be an excellent document editor, and
probably even a reasonable working group chair, with very minimal sponsor
awareness. I've paid my own way to IETFs twice, both times as WG/BOF
chairs, and I know that others have paid their own way many more times
than I have.
If an employee doesn't fill out a travel authorization to attend the face
to face meetings, does anyone on the management team even hear this tree fall?
Spencer,
I am afraid we are not on the same wavelength. We all did what you say. But
there is a time when you set up your priority budget. Attending the IETF is
the cost of a test server I need to oppose running tested code to people
using the IETF against our non-profit R&D for their own profit. I would
have no problem with their agenda, if the simple disclosing of their roots
made heir legitimate commercial relations known and obvious to all,
leading the community to be less impressed by the size of their Draft and
more attentive to its real interest, for who.
I am considering the seldom cases which counts. Where Sponsors are really
able to use the IETF, and the IANA, as a tool to protect their own
interests, biasing the Internet standard process. In this case the strategy
is not managed by a sponsor but through a consortium or a de facto
alliance. The management is informed and is in the lead. I think it is not
often (I know directly only three cases), but it is where the real danger
is: because the Internet architecture is not separately discussed. So, it
may be decided for long through small committing details (I know from
experience). This is the case where RFC 3869 describes the Internet R&D
financing by commercial interests: controlling that small committing detail
is of key importance before investing. Then the investment will in turn
commit the internet to the concerned interests. In the three cases I
refered to one is a failure, one is important but less than it could have
been, the last one is just being carried.
In these cases you have two or three geeks/managers involving themselves,
to show who is the boss when needed. Then you have well educated
specialised set of people, to author Drafts, co-Chair the WG, assume
complementary Draft preparation, manage the IANA registry, etc. Then you
have standard Members to sustain the "consensus" (by exhaustion) and to
erode opposition to that end. The game is not to produce the best document
for all, but to "win" against "competition's" propositions. Leading to the
fun of seeing an intended BCP (as a successor to an RFC also dealing with
Internet standard process issues) to invent a standard track proposition
forbidding existing practices and running code.
I submit that publishing the resume of all the participants and the source
of their IETF funding would help everyone understand these cases and would
reduce them to welcome (but probably less staffed and funded) standard
propositions. Commercial money cannot be dealt with the same as public
money, as non-profit money, as personal money. Or you unbalance the whole
process.
jfc
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