Re: Common sense, process, and the nature of change

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Ted,

On 11/8/2012 2:46 PM, Ted Hardie wrote:
      why is that we seem now to have more process
and less reliance on common sense?
...
   Thinking a bit about the directions that conversation took, I think
there is both a relatively simple answer to Andrew's question and a
much larger piece of context that need to be teased out of the
discussion.  The relatively simple answer is that we don't just use
common sense any more because we don't want to trust individuals as
much as we used to.

And the decisions have dramatically larger effects.

And those making the decisions are held dramatically more accountable.

And the IETF community is dramatically more diverse, which means far less shared culture about process.

And...

And...



>   That lack of trust isn't directed at the current
IESG, IAOC,  or IAB, but at future incumbents.

This assessment has what empirical basis?

Quite a few appealing alternative theories could be postulated. I hope that selecting among them is subject to more analysis than a popularity contest of subjective feel. ("It's the answer because we all decide it feels right.")


    We have come to the
idea that allowing a current set of office-holders to make ad hoc
decisions implies that all later incumbents will share that ability.

This is a rather existential community. Most of our behaviors here pertain to the present, including present actors.

But really, Ted, where does your idea come from, that the issues with our current operation hang on some amorphous concern about unspecified, future actors, rather than some set of our current actors?


I think that's where the larger context comes in.  The IETF is not
simply an engineering organization, it is a mission-based
organization.  Our mission is to make the Internet work and grow.

We like to utter phrases like that. They are nice phrases about goals that no one could reasonably object to.

However they actually have essentially nothing to do with the concrete technical work we do here, except to the extent we pay engineering attention to scaling.

In fact, lofty, abstract goals such as you cite almost certainly distract us from the pragmatics that we have the skills to attend to.

But feel free to cite specifics that distinguish between what we (would) do merely as an engineering organization, versus what we (actually?) do as an organization to make the Internet grow.


Belief in that mission is something built into the context of the
IETF, and it is part of what helps each of us guide our decisions
here.  Where some SDOs get compromises entirely by horse-trading, many
of the compromises that let the IETF work by rough consensus actually
come about because of that shared mission.

Oh? It isn't because, for example, we simply worry more about engineering quality? (When we actually do worry about it...)


 We recognize that
compromise to get interoperability is a key part of what lets the
Internet continue to work and grow.

Whereas most of the IETF engineering discussions about compromise that I've participated in were in terms of what it will take to make things work. You know, the sort of thing engineers worry about. There are actually rather few marketing discussions about growing the Internet, during these engineering compromise discussions.


The other thing that context suggests is probably equally important.
As a mission-based organization, we have a natural touchstone for
evaluating change.  If a proposed change furthers the mission of the
organization, we can likely manage the transition it implies, whatever
the scale might be.  If it hinders the mission of the organization, it
shouldn't be taken on however cheaply and easily it might be done.

I'd be interested to hear some examples of when this has been done, in and for the terms you cite, since I don't recall participating in any.


d/
--
 Dave Crocker
 Brandenburg InternetWorking
 bbiw.net


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