> From: Brian E Carpenter [mailto:brc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] > This choice of words implies that you're thinking of a WG as > an autonomous body with its own objectives. But that isn't > the way I look at any IETF WG. An IETF WG is a component of > the IETF, and the IETF's first goal is "to make the Internet > work better" That depends very much on your view of the structure of knowledge. In another forum there are people busy building a 'Web of Knowledge' based on the logical positive principles of Witttgenstein's Tractatus. That forum has a constitution that allows for a considerable degree of top down direction and has made substantial progress in reifying these principles irregardless of the critique of the later Wittgenstein that suggests the effort is doomed in this particular form. My view of the IETF is that it is formed on the opposite, post-modern approach in which 'true knowledge' is rejected as a chimera and instead seeing 'reliable knowledge' as emerging from a diversity of views as a result of process. We do not create reality in the IETF, we merely document the reality that is created elsewhere in code. If someone is successful in creating a piece of reality however distasteful to some it will get documented somewhere, somehow.
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