Hi
At last night's plenary, I raised some related issues about the
difficulties posed by the interactions between current systems
for developing and editing documents working groups through the
approval and publication processes and the growing number of
people in the community who do sound technical work but who
cannot express themselves easily and well in clear technical
English. In one of those comments, I suggested that the issues
were likely to continue to get more important as the IETF
diversified to including participants from areas we haven't seen
before and mentioned likely increased numbers of participants
from Mars. My intent was to abstract the problem as much as
possible to avoid even the appearance of singling out any one
country or region as the source of the issue. I don't believe
that is the case and have observed (and did last night) that we
have first-language speakers of English who write good and bad
technical English as well as many first-language speakers of
other languages who write better technical English than the
native-speaker average.
In any event, I've gotten some feedback that some people thought
I was identifying them as Martians and were offended. No
offense was intended and I used the "Martian" terminology
precisely to avoid that possibility. I obviously failed and
apologize to anyone who didn't hear or understand what I was
trying to say in the way I intended to say it. I'll try to
watch my choice of vocabulary even more in the future.
john