Re: Public musing on the nature of IETF membership and employmentstatus

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I had a brief chat with Stephan and Fred privately on a variant of this...

I happen to chair three working groups, and my concern with Stephan's scenario was not that someone (to use Hadriel's example) goes to work for an SBC vendor and is now seeing protocol traces from deployed networks that change "the right answer" from proposal A to proposal B.

I know that when I went to work for a network monitor system vendor, I saw lots of protocol traces that were amazing - that part makes perfect sense to me.

My concern as chair was trying to evaluate technical inputs like

- "I used to back proposal A, but

- after my employment change, I suddenly know reasons why proposal B is better, but

- I can't share those reasons with you, because the information is proprietary to my new employer"

My experience with appeals to technical information not in evidence has been that the IETF does not respond well to those appeals.

As recently as yesterday, Hadriel told me "I can't say much about that, because we're not under NDA, *but what I can tell you is ...*". I think what I'm reacting to, is what Bernard Aboba (in this case) and I would need to do as chairs, if Hadriel had said "I can't say much about that, because the information is proprietary, but I was wrong before and now I'm right". At a minimum, I'd HOPE that any declaration of working group consensus based on participants who can't tell us why the consensus is technically correct, would be appealed.

If I'm misunderstanding Stephan's scenario, I apologize, and look forward to better understanding your point of view.

Thanks,

Spencer

----- Original Message ----- From: Fred Baker
To: Hadriel Kaplan
Cc: Mark Atwood ; ietf@xxxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, April 09, 2010 3:00 AM
Subject: Re: Public musing on the nature of IETF membership and employmentstatus


Please don't understand me to say that employment doesn't affect views. Time affects views, life affects views, and yes employment affects views. What I was referring to was a sudden change, indicative of toeing a line. I would have a problem with someone that had told me he thought one thing suddenly thinking another and not being able to explain the switch in terms other than "that's my new employer's position".
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