--On Saturday, February 01, 2014 12:41 -0500 Hector Santos <hsantos@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi Chris, > > How does the IETF feel about having "multiple standards" of > the same thing, in other words, redundancy? > > I don't think we generally want that, and I don't think we > want "bad" ideas becoming standards because it becomes harder > and costly to undue. > > However, we do need to document them too as well to allow > people to try them out. So if the authors don't wish to make > it, EXPERIMENTAL, BCP or INFORMATIONAL, a better option is to > further it as a Proposed Method rather than get bounce around, > wasting so much time as a Proposed Standard where Rough >... Hector, While "proposed method" may be better terminology, this most recent explanation sounds to me as if you are reinvention what "Proposed Standard" was supposed to be, with "real" standardization (and recommendations about adoption, non-test deployment, and use) coming only with "Draft Standard". Sadly that hasn't worked for many years. One could debate whether it ever really worked consistently. >From observations of a number of standards bodies that do work in so-called "high technology" areas (not just networking), part of the problem is that companies are most likely to send design-level engineers with real product involvement to meetings when the technology is still new and being designed. Once there is a design and organizations have made a commitment to production-quality implementations, deployment, aales and marketing, or operations, the tendency is for those the time of those design-level engineers to be considered too valuable to spend on standardization and participation shifts toward those whose roles have more to do with protecting company interests, worrying about process rather than technology details, and doing the kind of fine-tuning and second-guessing that are often described in terms of second (or third) system effects. That pattern is independent of whatever one calls the first stage in the process -- the folks with the most design knowledge and experience participate actively early-on (if at all) and things evolve after that toward professional standardizers over time. The IETF has been much more successful than average at avoiding or minimizing that pattern (although I think we are worse at it than we were a few decades ago when Internet fundamentals were still being designed and tested). But the tendencies are there and I think it is extremely unlikely that fiddling around with names will have little lasting effect. best, john