Re: AD Time

[Ted Lemon <mellon@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Jul 30, 2018, at 8:42 PM, Donald Eastlake <d3e3e3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I don't understand how anyone who has participated much in the IETF
could claim that there isn't a significant volunteer ethos.

The reason I keep saying things like this is not that I think there's no volunteer ethos here.   It's that I have heard something like a dozen repetitions of the same argument, which boils down to:

1. The IETF is a special place, unlike any other

2. People come to the IETF purely out of the goodness of their hearts, and not because they (a) value the IETF and (b) are able to get funding to come.

3. Providing funding in some way that is not paid for by the employer of the person who comes will cause problems because [emotional reason|something bad happened in some other completely different organization].

The volunteer argument is one of those.   Do I keep going to the IETF because I think it's socially valuable?   Yes.   Would I do it if I weren't paid to do it?   Only if I had some standard I wanted to get published, and thought the IETF process was worth the really significant amount of time and effort it would take, as compared to just publishing it in a blog, which is what I usually do when I want to share something trivial.

Look, it's clear that there's no appetite here to have the IETF pay ADs.   You really don't need to keep throwing arguments at me to get that point across.   But it's a bit frustrating to see so many people I respect making arguments that basically amount to appeals to emotion or the presumption that a correlation seen in some other context must necessarily imply a causal mechanism that will also apply to this context.   That's the reason I keep replying to these messages, not because I expect to get the IETF to adopt my modest proposal.