----- Original Message ----- From: "Nico Williams" <nico@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: "Phillip Hallam-Baker" <phill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Cc: "Christian Huitema" <huitema@xxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Sunday, September 30, 2018 9:32 PM > 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. Nico I see it differently, being involved with other volunteer organisations that can and do move quickly. The issue I see is a lack of management, that the IETF is largely driven from below. The weakness, for me, manifests itself in the lack of input by WG Chairs. Thus I would like such chairs to be discouraged from creating I-Ds, rather focussing on helping other people's I-Ds progress. When a chair creates an I-D, then they are spending less time on managing the work of others, they cannot themselves perform the role of the chair w.r.t. the I-D, they may have a conflict of interest between the ideas in their I-D and those of other I-Ds, all bad news for progress. I think, too, that chairs should be restrained in their comments, being more in the role of a casting vote, rather than cheer-leader for any particular idea. Yes, volunteers are motivated by all sorts of reasons, somewhat different to an employee of a commercial organisation, and may not take kindly to being told what to do and what not to do by someone 'managing' the process but most participants show an affiliation, e.g. in their e-mail address, with a commercial organisation that I assume is cognisant with their contributions and has an interest in the work progressing so they are volunteers in name, but with a commercial imperative in the background. Tom Petch > > 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 > -- >
