Re: Internet organisations coordination meeting

[John Curran <jcurran@xxxxxxxx>]

Jorge - 

 

    This particular group of folks gathered and received updates on various activities 

    going on... e.g.  Jari and Russ spoke of perpass.  It is a coordinating function; so 

    we know about major initiatives going on and can support and/or avoid conflicts 

    as appropriate.

    The only reason for the post-meeting statements (in my view) is simply because 

    people were unaware that these periodic gatherings were going on, and indicated

    that we should be make such more visible.

    Note also that there quite a bit of focus on making sure the most recent statement

    simply said what happened, i.e.  a gathering of folks received a series of updates 

    from each other on a list of topics of potentially mutual interest.  

    As a result, I now realize that W3C is having its 20th anniversary; that ICANN's

    various strategy panels have been meeting, and that the "Brazil meeting" is now

    know as  “Netmundial” and has its own website <http://netmundial.br>.   I don't 

    really know what the other leaders (for lack of a better term) took away, but 

    would hope that Jari, Russ, etc. found it useful context and background for their

    IETF efforts.    I guess that one option would be for the "leaders" from the IETF

    community not to attend such gatherings, but that seems to be a rather extreme

    response to take due to lack of a better term than "leader" (and one hopes it is

    unnecessary so long as care is taken to make nothing more of the meetings than

    what they are - a gathering of folks hearing updates so we can better coordinate)

FYI,

/John

On Feb 16, 2014, at 10:58 AM, Jorge Amodio <jmamodio@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I agree that "spokesperson" is not either the appropriate term. And leader is far far away to be representative of their roles and positions.

True that on their role they "lead" the organizations they are involved with but the Internet community does not follow them as *leaders*, particularly the CEOs of some organizations such as ICANN, ARIN, etc, that are just paid employees to play a specific executive role.

I'm really starting to dislike this effort of reverting the bottom-up process by a group that is starting to behave like a dictatorial junta making public statements that can be considered or interpreted as representative of the Internet community and particular organizations such as IETF.

They are no spokesperson, nor leaders, just they are what they are the CEO of ICANN, the Chair of IETF, the CEO of ARIN, etc.

My .02

Jorge

On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 6:20 AM, Ted Lemon <ted.lemon@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Folks, as John Klensin said, the reason we do not say "spokesperson" is that our leadership do not speak for us.   We only speak as a group through the consensus process.   So the term "spokesperson" is simply inaccurate.

The term "leader" makes sense as a generic because there were a number of organizations, with different leadership structures, some not involving the same consensus process that exists in the IETF.   So we couldn't for example say "chair," because that term wouldn't apply to all the people who signed the statement.

I realize that the term "leader" has its own set of connotations, but I don't know of a better word to use.   There is no word that we could use that would convey to someone who is not already familiar with IETF process what we mean.   Representative is no good for the same reason spokesperson is no good.   Avatar doesn't really work either.

I think it's better to just accept that the language is imprecise, and think carefully about what is that we might be objecting to, and whether the objection _really_ makes sense in the context.   I guess there's about zero chance that this won't get discussed to death, and that's fine, but I don't think there's a knob to turn here.