On 26/02/2014 21:34, S Moonesamy wrote: ... > I am not comfortable stating that there is consensus on an > Internet-Draft when participation is from a small number of individuals > having some affiliation in common. That creates an appearance of a > private club. But participation is open to everybody; if I don't choose to comment on a draft, that is my problem, not the problem of those who do comment. Nobody has ever told me that I am not allowed to comment. > It is difficult to convince someone who is, for example, from a > developing country that the IETF is a large open international community > when a quick look at > http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/maillist.html shows > that there has only been participation from individuals from one or two > countries. I'm sorry... which particular mail threads do you mean? Anyway, a lot of comments come from a country called gmail, which you won't find in the UN list. I understand that it's hard for people to understand that there is no barrier to speech in the IETF and that there is no secret handshake. On 27/02/2014 06:12, S Moonesamy wrote: ... > I think that some people would be surprised to hear what is said in private and what is said in public. Really? It seems to me to be a universal aspect of human behaviour that people are more disciplined and careful when speaking in public than when speaking in private. If my private opinion is that some IETF work is "Yuck", "Pointless", or "Relatively harmless" (examples from my private notes) I am unlikely to say so in public. I would use more analytic language. Brian