On Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 1:04 PM, Joe Touch <touch@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > > On 5/29/2014 5:51 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: >> >> On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 12:15 PM, Joe Touch <touch@xxxxxxx> wrote: >> >>> I'm talking about whether the IETF/ISOC is a useful home for the >>> discussion. >>> I don't think it is, because for every 100 network researchers there are >>> 101 >>> such documents "predicting the future", none of which have done much >>> without >>> associated money. >> >> >> Well you completely missed the difference between a goal and a prediction: >> >> A goal is an outcome that is desired. >> A prediction is an outcome that is expected. > > > I think you have it reversed: > - a goal is an outcome towards which a community is working > (with funding to back it up) > > - prediction is what groundhogs do early February, and people > do with about as much accuracy and utility > > >> As I pointed out at the start, the money concern here is what to spend it >> on. > > > The people with the money get to decide that. Joe, I know you think you have a point here but you don't. Back when I did high energy physics we did experiments costing over $1 billion for no particular reason than to satisfy our curiosity. The Web has added over a trillion dollars a year to global GDP. There is no shortage of governments willing to back efforts to build the next generation Web. There is no shortage of companies either. That does not mean that every government is always willing to fund every type of project. Coming from the UK I know all about governments who don't have a clue when it comes to funding research. But I also know about it from the other side and the problem that the type of research the academics want to do is not the type of research the funders are interested in. The type of projects that gets publications and tenure in academia are low risk incremental studies of irrelevancies. I am currently working on usable secure email, S/MIME and PGP done right. Now that would not get tenure in any university and it certainly would not get a published paper in a journal. But it is what we need right now in the Internet community. Fortunately for me, I can do that work because I have commercial backing for my research (Comodo) and independent private means. But most people who might want to do that type of work are not so fortunate. Even in the IETF most people are working on near run products not thinking about the future. The whole point of proposing an Internet 2020 type program is precisely to tell the politicians who make the real decisions on funding that there are people they can talk to with a vision aligned with theirs. Funding is really not the problem here. The politicians would be only too happy to write us physicist sized cheques for a next generation Internet research project if they think there is a reasonable chance it will deliver something they value. The physicists got the cash for the LHC because they put up a very simple proposition that the politicians could understand: Find the Higgs Boson. That sales pitch got them the $10 billion they needed. If you think money is the problem then you are not talking to the right people, you don't understand the concerns of the people with the money. Get the vision thing right and the money will flow.