On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 4:18 PM, Dave Crocker <dhc@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Ted, > > Hi Dave, Thanks for taking the time to respond. I think some of the points you make below echo some of the issues Sam raised, particularly that the scope of authority makes increased process appropriate. I'm still thinking about that, and I don't have much more to say on it right now. There were a couple of other questions you asked that I answered in-line. > On 11/8/2012 2:46 PM, Ted Hardie wrote: <snip> > 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? Both during the recent discussion of the whether a body can declare a seat vacant and in previous process discussions, I have seen a lot of postings and heard a fair number of hallways conversations that boiled down to "this sets a bad precedent". Some of my thinking about this is simply trying to understand what people think is happening when they say "it sets a precedent" in our context. My experience may, of course, be unusual, and people could also be using that as a cover for issues that actually pertain to the current set of leaders. > > > >> 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. I think we simply disagree about this. I've pointed a lot of new folks to BCP95/RFC 3935 (our mission statement) and I think it helps folks understand why we work on what we do and what our goals are. It absolutely comes across as trite in some contexts, something I admitted at the end of my initial mail. <snip> > >> 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...) > I think there's more than engineering quality. A good recent example of this comes from the RTCWEB working group. The group decided during its charter phase to avoid interoperability failure during its negotiations by making some baseline audio and video codecs mandatory to implement. During the audio codec selection decision, there was an explicit effort to make sure that the codec could be implemented and deployed by the widest possible set of actors. That was a compromise by the folks who had sunk costs in implementations of other codecs, in order to grow the pie will be RTCWEB. Did anyone mention our mission statement during that discussion? Absolutely not. But I think that class of compromise, where we put the goal of growing the system above our individual interests, does happen pretty often in the IETF. YMMV. regards, Ted