Changing the subject line and moving away from debates about logic fallacies and attacks... --On Wednesday, February 26, 2014 02:44 +0100 Abdussalam Baryun <abdussalambaryun@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > John, > > The person have been in the IETF meeting remotely > participating, and the current WGs agenda is not known how it > was organised so the suggestion was based on past and current > facts. Actually, in many WGs, those who have been actively participating in the WG are fairly aware of how the agenda was constructed and organized. Many WG chairs ask for agenda suggestions before the agenda is posted, others conclude (as I often have) that the work of the WG makes the agenda obvious and not worth wasting list time on [1]. Once the preliminary agenda for a WG meeting is posted, WG participants are free to ask questions about it or even to challenge it [2]. It the agenda is not posted, even after complaints within the WG or suggestions for changes are ignored, it is entirely reasonable and appropriate to immediately involve the AD, questioning whether the WG Chair(s) need additional supervision and/or their appropriateness for the role. In all of the above, WGs differ. Some have many agenda items, some only a few. Some are at stages in their work where they consider tutorial-style presentations appropriate, others have specific issues that they need to be discuss and need to assume that anyone with an interest in participating (rather than merely observing) will have read (and made a serious effort to understand) the relevant drafts. In some, there is a lot of room for improvement in how those norms and expectations are communicated within the WG; others do well about that. The existence of those differences has been discussed often enough on this list that I believe it is reasonable to expect those who have participated in more than two or three meetings, even remotely, and who take their participation seriously and expect other to do so, to understand it. Those differences, and that presumption of understanding, means that any "all WGs should do X" suggestion is immediately suspect, independent of who makes it or the value of "X". "Suspect" doesn't mean it is necessarily wrong or a bad idea, just that it will get a lot more scrutiny and that someone making the proposal would be well-advised to provide more extensive explanation and rationale when the suggestion is made. If that isn't present, the person making the suggestion is likely to discover that some of us respond with too-long notes (like this one) that explore the details and that others respond with short comments or questions that can easily be mistaken for attacks on the proposer whether that is intended or not. I'm sure there is a happy middle ground but many of us, in part due to lack of time, aren't good at consistently finding it. > Readers may assume the person is not experience but why do > they assume that meeting don't need improvement or why they > assume that current meeting agenda cannot be commented on or > why they assume that IETF meeting are perfectly organised. I think you are making assumptions in the paragraph above that are symptomatic of why you then perceive yourself as being mistreated. I've been around the community for some years, have participated in multiple WGs, authored or edited multiple documents, and held a few WG Chair and other "leadership" positions. I don't think I've run into anyone with significant IETF experience who believes the system (or meetings in particular) would not benefit from improvements. There is less agreement about what those improvements should be, as some spectacular failures in process change efforts demonstrate. Similarly, no one I know of assumes that focused comments on the meeting agenda are out of order. There are typically many comments on the IETF list about ordering of meetings and conflicts among WG slots; if you had visibility into the WG Chairs list (see note [2] below), you would have seen far more. And comments on particular WG agendas are very much in order within those WGs, as discussed above. The key problem with your comment/suggestion, stripped of all of the (IMO) emotional and peripheral comments that followed (relevant or not), was that it made (or appeared to make) a blanket suggestion of a change for all WGs without nearly enough argument or explanation _within the proposal note_ to overcome the strong presumption that WGs differ sufficiently that no suggestion about agenda constraints is applicable to all of them. I note that, while much of the community agrees in principle that extensive "presentations" in WG sessions are bad news, ideas to ban them have gotten no traction for much the same reason. > IMHO If the comment was from some one else, many will change > their mind just because he/she is popular experience not > because of any other type of experience. For the reasons given above, I just do not believe that. If that exact same comment had come, e.g., from Dave Crocker or myself, the substantive response that it was not a useful idea would almost certainly have been identical. There would be a difference: many members of the community feel far more freedom to heap abuse on Dave and myself (and sometimes we on each other) when we suggest something about which the community thinks we should have known better than they would do with someone whose experience in the community is less deep and tested. I look forward to meeting you in person next week. best, john [1] Perhaps, in the quest for transparency, that is bad judgment although, as usual, I remain instinctively opposed to more rigid rules. For the same reason and because most WG chairs don't need extra work, I'm instinctively opposed to rules that would require the WG chair(s) to explain the agenda choices when the preliminary agenda is posted. Both of those topics might well benefit from additional discussion among those who are interested (I hope not on the IETF list). [2] These kinds of topics in WG leadership and management are among those that are periodically discussed on the WG Chairs list and training sessions. For reasons of efficiency and to avoid various sorts of disruption and attacks (neither of which is an entirely theoretical problem) that list and those sessions are limited to WG Chairs (and the IAB and IESG). From time to time, I've advocated making the mailing list or its archives available on a read-only basis to the broader community and/or broadcasting the training sessions on an informational, listen-only, basis. I think that either or both might improve transparency and understanding of what WG Chairs do and why, but have never pressed the idea when it hasn't gotten traction. IESG and EDU team, perhaps it is time to consider it.