> --On Saturday, April 19, 2014 08:17 -0700 > ned+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > > I've been thinking about it, and I think this needs to be > > addressed on at least > > two different fronts. First, I've come to believe that the > > IETF needs to say > > something, in some capacity, about the political aspects of > > the DMARC situation specifically. > > > > I also think the time has come to try and address the more > > general problem > > of misunderstanding and/or misrepresentation of the status of > > various > > documents. This probably needs to be addressed through a > > combination of > > automatic labeling as well as some explicit statements here > > and there. > Ned, > I agree, but I also think there is another element of the > situation that got us here, and that has led us close to other > problems in the past. When the RFC Editor is asked to publish a > non-WG document (i.e., either an individual submission through > the IETF stream or as an independent submission) that could be > construed as some sort of standard (whether actually standards > track or not) or approval of an IANA parameter registration is > on the basis of expert review, there as a potential for the > appearance of conflicts of interest. Those conflicts need not > be of the traditional legal or financial variety. They can > occur (or be perceived to occur) when someone's institutional or > organizational relationships outside the IETF might lead people > to suspect that review and decision-making might not be as > careful, unbiased, or primarily reflective of the interest of > the IETF or the broader Internet community as we would like it > to assume it always is. For situations where troublesome > relationships exist or might be inferred (even by those > suffering from mild paranoid), we need to get much more careful > about disclosure of the relationships involved. Good point, and I agree. These waters are going to be difficult to nagivate, but I don't see any alternative. Ned