Re: delegating (portions of) ietf list disciplinary process (fwd)

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On Sep 29, 2005, at 9:39, Dean Anderson wrote:
Let me ask you Ken: Are you participating in the IETF as part of your job? Or
are you just here for personal kicks?

It's part of my job; has been for a few years.

It has nothing to do with legal standing. Its a question of etiquette. Office
etiquette and backyard-fence etiquette are different.

True.

Still, it is generally considered discourteous among most serious email users, I think. But we seem to have gone past the point where that matters to
people.

This is only true with respect to PERSONAL communication. BUSINESS communication
is not personal communication.

"Business communication" is not one homogeneous class of communications. Technical matters on the IETF lists are one thing; personnel discussions about employees would be quite another. And the level of privacy expected, and the degree of rudeness associated with publishing someone's not-previously-public communications, vary; they are not binary choices. Email I might exchange with selected individuals outside MIT on how to implement some feature in our (open source, repository-accessible) product would fall somewhere in between. In my experience there is certainly work-related email that is not legally required to be private but would be considered rude to disseminate widely without getting permission.

In this particular case, where it sounds like the mailing list was explicitly kept off the recipient list, that sounds like a pretty clear indication that the sender probably didn't want it as public as the previous mail being responded to -- much as if someone took you aside from a crowd to make a couple of comments instead of shouting at you in the middle of the room. Perhaps you don't distinguish those cases; other people do. But apparently your interpretation of business etiquette trumps his wishes, and whatever his intent was in not including the IETF at large ... in your mind, though apparently not his, and not mine.

You don't understand the distinction between business and personal.

I understand that the type of a communication cannot be fully represented in one binary digit.

Actually, I'm now convinced that this is the whole problem with the abuse at the IETF: An inability to distinguish between personal and organizational interests
and subject matter.

There may be some of that. I strongly doubt that's all there is to it, though.

So, if I wanted to make comments to you about IETF matters, people's personal
conduct on mailing lists, etc, that I didn't want made public to fuel
arguments I specifically don't want to add to, I should ask you to sign an NDA
first?  Got it, I'll keep that in mind.

Those are business topics. If you are concerned about "fueling" something, then you should keep silent. Only a lack of fact adds "fuel", otherwise known as
hyperbole.

Sometimes what's needed is to encourage both sides to step back a bit from a dispute for a while, or suggest that one side use or abandon some specific line of argument to make the discussion more productive. I think that's sometimes better done in private communication with individual parties rather than in public, but it's still business, and one shouldn't need an NDA to figure out that it's preferably not to be made public. (Then again, I guess sometimes making it public -- "look! even so-and-so thinks you're a loser! clearly I'm right!" -- may suit one person's desire to fan the flames, or to "win" at all costs. It may be jumping to conclusions to think that *everyone* wants a polite, productive discussion, or that they're capable of engaging in one in the face of strong opposition....)



I'm sad to say, I've actually looked at a little of the stuff you've posted on the web page you set up recently, concerning Ted Ts'o. I picked the "July 1" off-list stuff to look at, briefly. From that admittedly small sample... let me try to phrase this carefully to avoid anything that might be construed as an ad-hominem attack: I disagree with your summary of some of the messages I reviewed.

Ted disagrees with you on the importance of some things you bring up, and says what you're presenting isn't very useful (to the discussion at hand, I would assume he meant, on reading his message); your summary turns this into ``Tso says facts are "not useful" to the IETF.'' Without a qualifier like "these facts" and "this discussion", that's an unsupported, even absurd, generalization; you're ascribing to Ted statements that he did not make.

Ted asked for information on the "court-proven liars" (plural, your phrase), and you seem to have responded with info on multiple court cases against one person. Ted points that out, and uses the somewhat inaccurate description "lost a lawsuit" in doing so. He does acknowledge that this *one* person is, in at least one instance, a "court-proven liar" as you put it; his wording could be read to suggest, but does not actually state (as your summary says he does), that there was only one lawsuit. "Has lost such a lawsuit", to me, does not at all suggest "only one"; "person who lost a lawsuit" does suggest it somewhat, in this context. "One proven act" would suggest it more strongly, though by that point he's talking in more general terms.

But his emphasis appears to be on the number of defendants rather than lawsuits, and that whole aspect isn't the main thrust of his message, which is suggesting that the focus should be on the disputed statement rather than the character of the person making it. And if you accept Ted's point that the lawsuits aren't as important as examining the disputed statement, the difference between the logical "there exists a lawsuit" and "there were three of them" isn't very important -- a logical step I think he should've made more explicit in his message -- and then the references to "a lawsuit" and "one proven act" are more clearly in the "there exists" sense. (And if I were in Ted's shoes at that time, I probably would've ignored the implied suggestion that I go hunt through your web site or use Google to try to find the information I had asked you to provide on the other people your use of the plural implies.)

I haven't read up on enough of the context to form an opinion on the reputation versus statement accuracy issue in this instance.

So, to summarize my look at a few of the messages: You both lose points for some of your statements or how you tried to make your arguments, and the accuracy of the summary page is questionable. None of it, so far, really suggests any sort of professional dishonesty on Ted's part to me. (If this were a research paper instead of an email message, I'd probably want him to be much more careful and even pedantic in his arguments, but that would be about the quality of the work, not honesty.)

Bored now, and not interested in the case under discussion in that old thread; I'm going to stop digging....

Ken

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