| From my perspective...
We really want to think of IETF participants as individuals. As Brian says, it is a useful fiction, which allows all sorts of things to be bypassed. I would be truly disappointed if someone I was collaborating with on a draft or was working on a working group with me fundamentally changed their opinion as they changed employers; I would wonder if they were lying to me before the change or after.
The reason we note affiliations, however, at least in my very humble opinion, is for situational awareness. If someone does try to stack a committee or "stuff the ballot box", which has happened, it would be nice to have the information to notice it. Beyond that, it's a potentially-interesting but otherwise useless factoid.
On Apr 8, 2010, at 12:08 PM, Donald Eastlake wrote: On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 7:14 AM, Roni Even <ron.even.tlv@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If this is true it make me wonder why does the IETF care about
the affiliation of WG chairs and ADs Roni Even
The reason traditionally given that IETF participants in general give their affiliation is for purposes of individual identification.
The reason there is concern about too many people with the same affiliation in positions where they judge consensus or the like is to avoid situations where the organization with which they are affiliated would appear to or would have the possibility to dominate.
The only hard and fast rules about this in the IETF that I know about are that nomcom volunteers are required to give their affiliation and no more than two voting nomcom members can have the same affiliation. Whether this rule is good or bad is a matter of judgement but it was adopted after multiple cases where more than two randomly selected voting nomcom members had the same affiliation and some people felt this created the impression of dominance.
Thanks, Donald
Much of what makes the IETF work is how it is very different
from other standards bodies (such as IEEE, ANSI, ISO, NIST, ITU, etc etc).
One key difference is that "groups" do not join
the IETF.
Cisco, IBM, MCI, or Linden Lab are not a "members"
of the IETF. No agency of the US government, or of any other government,
is a "member" of the IETF. No university, non-profit, PIRG,
PAC, or other "concerned citizens group", is a "member" of
the IETF.
Only individual people can be "members" of the
IETF. And "membership" is mostly defined as "who shows up
on the mailing list" and "who shows up at the meetings".
There have been many cases in the history of the IETF where
well known members who are in the middle of writing standards or of chairing
various important working groups, who have worked for well-known large
companies, will change employers, to other companies, to startups, or to
personal sabbaticals switch around between industry, academia, research,
and government, and this will not, does not, and should not, affect their
position inside the IETF at all.
It appears that sometimes people, inside and outside of
the IETF, need to be reminded of this.
If you want to write standards like the IEEE and ITU do it,
you know where you can find them.
But when you choose to participate in the IETF process, that
is how it works.
And if someone feels that anyone's change in employment
status should affect their standing in any part of the IETF process, that
person has missed the point, and needs to be pointedly reminded of their
mistake.
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