--On Tuesday, December 09, 2014 11:36 -0600 Nico Williams <nico@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Fri, Dec 05, 2014 at 02:49:41PM -0500, John C Klensin wrote: >> As a member of or sympathizer with various societies for bear >> encouragement and preservation (black, brown, polar, Cub >> Scouts, Teddy, Pooh, ... in no particular order), I find this >> name really objectionable. From the description, >> "unbearerable" might have been better, "betterbearer" >> certainly would have been. > > If the outcome is intended to be proof-of-possession > extensions that render bearer token schemes > no-longer-bearer... then "unbearable" seems better than > "betterbearer", though I agree with you that "unbearable" > comes across as potentially insulting. Maybe we should all be > thick- skinned[*] enough to get the joke and move on, but: > >> I wonder if anyone has ever appealed a mailing list name. > > The risk here is that key participants might simply... ignore > it until it's too late. I think the AD can probably do some > promotion to try to avoid such an outcome. Nico, I was trying to keep the complaint light and at least slightly humorous, but I am concerned that we seem to often choose names for passing amusement value that later turn out to cause confusion, bad attitudes or worse. Those reactions sometimes occur in communities who are not normally visible in the IETF. It may also be that my periodic involvement with the collection of policy, strategy, organizational, administrative, and regulatory issues that are mischaracterized as "Internet governance" (more outside the IETF than inside) has left me oversensitive, but I've had to listen to discussions --in obvious and not-so-obvious places-- in which the IETF is dismissed as a bunch of small children who are too impressed by their own cleverness and busy and with activities like self-congratulatory giggling about their latest in-joke or esoteric debate about things that make no difference to be taken seriously. Independent of how important those reactions actually are, with the sorts of discussions going on that have been represented here by the Internetgovtech and IANAPlan efforts, various clusters of countries trying to impose their own views about how the Internet should be structured and where those topics should be discussed, reviews of IGF and other discussion arrangements in progress, etc., it is probably not the best time to exhibit how clever we can be about silly names for Working Groups, Mailing Lists, or other activities. In that context, the risk of an appeal is that it would call even more unwanted attention to the topic. Just my opinion, of course. john