On Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 12:44:16PM -0400, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: > Nico is right in saying we don't choose who decides to participate. But we > do influence that choice. > > In particular, we can decide which communities to approach to invite > participation from and we can encourage or discourage people who come to > participate. We are not the passive captives of fate that some folk seem to > suggest. I made this point too. Right now we don't advertise to get participants. People end up having a reason to participate, and then they do (maybe; sometimes they have a reason and then don't). > I first started participating in IETF 25 years ago but I have not > participated here continuously. One of the reasons for that was that I did > not find IETF an inviting place to work. Folk would proclaim with great > certitude 'facts' about the nature of URLs and explain how it was necessary > to 'fix' the 'broken' architecture of the Web. That's to be expected. We're going to have opinionated people. That's not really a problem. The biggest problem here is how slow everything is. That's because we're volunteers and we're not fully funded to do things like review other people's I-Ds. People who want to create would prefer to write code and screw standardization at IETF. > Finally, unless you happen to be Dave Clark or Vint Cerf and you happen to > be designing a packet switching protocol to support a WAN of 10-1000 nodes > using 1970s technology, attempting to emulate their mode of work is > irrelevant. We are not re-designing IP. We are trying to manage the social > and technical consequences of the network scaling to ~10 billion users and > ~1 trillion nodes in the coming decade. We don't work the same way that they did, and we're not trying to emulate them. However, it's hard to make a volunteer organization work on a basis other than consensus seeking, if that's what you mean. Nico --
