Hi Phillip,
At 07:40 24-07-2014, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
Following up on some of the Plenary discussion:
1) 'Newbies' and 'Clueless people'
There are some folk who come to the list with proposals that are
clearly deranged. The guy proposing that TCP/IP should switch from
using square packets to round ones for instance.
That said, if there is one thing that is likely to set me off it is
when I see someone make a perfectly sensible proposal on the list and
gets back a response of the form 'This is insane and if you understood
anything about the subject area you would know why'.
What is considered as perfectly sensible is subjective. I would not
label someone as clueless as I consider it as a rude (
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/diversity/current/msg00251.html ).
When I see people trying to pull rank to squish ideas, I think it is
incumbent on the rest of us to respond.
That's not a good career move.
2) 'Already agreed'
I have great difficulty in determining what is 'already agreed' in an
organization that has no democratic decision making process. The IESG
can make decisions for the IESG but those are not necessarily
decisions of the IETF. We don't have an architecture board any more
since the legendary Kobe event.
I don't think that the architecture board pays much attention to
architecture in IETF drafts. Some years ago, it could be blamed on
Kobe. Nowadays, there isn't any incentive to do that
work. Architecture is left to industry consortiums.
But another problem with 'already agreed' is that most often the
people prating some dogma don't realize that (1) they are repeating a
slogan summarizing what was a subtle, highly nuanced argument and (2)
the Internet of 2 billion users is very different to the Internet of
the 1970s when some of these slogans were coined.
Yes.
It is bad form to question an Area Director when he or she says
"already agreed".
3) Never the right time
One of the process abuses that annoys me the most is when people find
that there is never a right time to raise their objection. During
charter formation they will be told that the focus must be highly
restricted to get anywhere. During the Working Group they are told it
is not in the charter. Then decisions get made that pre-empt their
proposal completely and they are told that it is too late THEY SHOULD
HAVE RAISED THEM EARLIER.
In my opinion the IESG would like to get feedback when they sent out
a charter for review. I don't know the level of feedback it
receives. If I had Recall privileges I would consider using it when
there are process abuses.
The following question may be relevant:
'Is the proposed work plan an open IETF effort or is it an attempt
to "bless" non-IETF technology where the effect of input from IETF
participants may be limited?'
And:
The interest must be broad enough that a working group would not be seen
as merely the activity of an industry consortium.
Regards,
S. Moonesamy