On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 09:57:55AM -0500, John Leslie wrote:
> Donald Eastlake <d3e3e3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> ] 3. Eighty Percent of Success is Showing Up
> ]
> ] It is the simplest thing! If you are absent, how can you have much
> ] prominence or influence?
> ]
> ] This applies to all venues, email/messaging, telephone/video
> ] conference, and especially in-person or face-to-face meetings. You
> ] do not need 100% attendance, but your absences should be rare. If
> ] possible, only miss less important events.
>
> Generally good advice...
>
> But many of us cannot afford the cost of three IETF weeks before we
> see some return. (Especially those who need their employer to subsidize
> three weeks of their time as well as the travel costs...)
>
> We cannot reasonably hope to change human nature -- least of all by
> writing one RFC -- but surely we can do something to ameliorate this
> economic disincentive?
I've always thought this is a feature, but a bug. The reality is that
there are a huge numbers of net.kooks out there. It may be
politically incorrect to say that, but it's true. So if you are
trying to pariticpate remotely, it's possible, but you have to be
really, really good with your technical presentations, your evidence,
with sample implementations, perhaps a huge installed base, etc.
(And funny that, if you have all of this, it's likely that some
company will be quite willing to fund you to show up to an IETF
meeting.)
Other standards committees have other ways of filtering out kooks. In
the ISO world, your company needs to pay $$$ to become a member of
some organization like ANSI or INCITES, or you have to get the US
State Department, or the equivalent in your company, to give you
accreditation. The fact that the IETF allows participation by
technically minded people trying to participate remotely, and
hopefully pursuade some number of people who *do* have funding to
attend in person to help champion your cause, makes it actually far
more open than many other standards organizations that I've had the
opportunity to work in.
For example, I was once involved in a ISO-related standards activity
where there was active plotting[1] to hold a series in-person meetings
in far-off countries in Asia specifically because there was a known
kook/troublemaker who was based out of Europe, and it was hoped that
by holding the meetings in various companies in Asia, it would put the
travel costs of this known trouble maker out of reach --- and it
worked; the person, who had gotten ISO accrediation for some small
country that had the same standing as all of the USA, never did end up
attending any of the in-person meetings.
[1] Not by me; I and the others who had originally done the technical
work wasn't up on the policies and procedures of ISO, so the companies
that were interested in pushing this standard forward paid $$$ to
consultants whose primary careers was to work the ISO process; I just
got to see that particular sausage making factory and was quite
astonished by how it worked in comparison to the IETF.
Is any of this perfect? No; but it's important to keep in mind that
standards organizations are composed of humans; both those who are
highly incentivized to make progress, and those who seem to have goals
to try to stop progress. Quite frankly, I find the IETF setup of
requiring the investment of in-person face time to be a far better way
of solving the "how do you filter out the koooks and make progress
while still being open" than what I've seen in other standards
settings processes.
- Ted