On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 10:50 AM, Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Well said Phillip. > > One question: > > Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: (snipped) >> >> 1) 'Newbies' and 'Clueless people' >> >> >> 2) 'Already agreed' >> >> >> We don't have an architecture board any more since the legendary Kobe >> event. >> > > Perhaps not quite legendary to those of us who weren't there. Can you > elaborate on the "legendary Kobe event," and why we no longer have an > architecture board? I was not their either. But here is my interpretation of what was going on. The received version is that the IAB cut a backroom deal with OSI to settle the IPv4 address space exhaustion issue with a move to the OSI stack. This obviously did not fly with the IETF participants and there was a major row. This had three lasting consequences, first any future co-operation with OSI was abandoned, second the NOMCON process was invented to address complaints about the lack of influence in the management of the organization while making sure that it would remain in the hands of the 'right' people and the IAB stopped attempting to do architecture. As we all know the IETF has its roots in the ARPANET. At the time of Kobe the management of the IETF was dominated by current and former DARPA program managers and principal investigators but the membership was considerably more diverse. So the Kobe rebellion was really the point at which the participants told the management that IETF was not going to be an appendage of DARPA any more and threatened to fork the IETF if they didn't agree. Bringing it back to the current governance issues it might be useful to point out that the IETF declared independence from the US government back in the 1990s and is already a thoroughly independent body that is in practice accountable only to the Internet Society and various sugar daddies and that to a limited degree.