>Well, I think there's a lot of confusion between the statement "We,
>as engineers trying to maintain our scientific integrity as a whole,
>consider this specification a good thing and recommend it", and "We,
>as disinterested engineers trying to be practical and document what
>gets used, note this specification is widely used".
The first statement best matches RFC 3935, except that "we" should be
read as the IETF "leaders" (what is realistic in a rough consensus
approach). The problem ("the near-impossibility of getting an
informed consensus opinion on a complex subject out of a community of
several thousand people in a short time") and this soliution is
documented in part 3.
Also, "The Internet isn't value-neutral, and neither is the IETF. We
want the Internet to be useful for communities that share our
commitment to openness and fairness. We embrace technical concepts
such as decentralized control, edge-user empowerment and sharing
of resources, because those concepts resonate with the core values
of the IETF community. These concepts have little to do with
the technology that's possible, and much to do with the technology
that we choose to create." However,"we are also constrained by the
principle of competence: Where we do not have, and cannot gather, the
competence needed to make technically sound standards, we should not
attempt to take the leadership." because "Sometimes the IETF
leverages standards that are defined and maintained by other
organizations; we continue to work with those organizations on their
standards and do not attempt to take them over."
This creates many difficulties in world reality which is under
distributed control, and therefore edge-user centric, working by
subsidiarity, using concerted procedures and consensus, while we may
chose to select parts of external standards and contradict their
inner logic because they are not based on the same core values, or do
not share our vision of these values.
The second statement seems therefore more appropriate. However this
is only a reporting mission and we miss the IEB (Internet Engineer's
Book) publication adequate system. We should therefore target some
intermediate statement between "influence" and "report" and consider
the RFC 3935 principles of responsiblity and competence, and the most
inportant sentence "the benefit of a standard to the Internet is in
interoperability - that multiple products implementing a standard are
able to work together in order to deliver valuable functions to the
Internet's users" remembering the quote above "Sometimes the IETF
leverages standards that are defined and maintained by other
organizations; we continue to work with those organizations on their
standards and do not attempt to take them over". Interoperability
must not be only within our own standards, but with the standards we
leverage" we have the duty to respect and to know.
jfc
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