IESG,
As someone (whose name I didn't catch and whose voice I didn't
recognize, but many thanks) noticed just before the plenary
ended, I submitted a question via Jabber with "MIC" in front of
it shortly after the IESG took the stage. What then happened is
probably more important than the question itself, which I will
come back to.
We claim to want to be welcoming to newcomers. There was a good
deal of discussion about that subject during the IESG part of
the plenary, all of which I think was helpful. However, as
costs of meetings and logistical complications rise, it is
important to understand that many newcomers will participate
remotely before attending their first meeting(s) and that
others, especially those who are not supported by companies or
organizations with unlimited resources, will do some meetings
remotely early in their IETF careers. We also claim to be
supportive of remote participation, but that needs to be more
than just having the right technology in place. Similar to the
comments that were made about experienced people treating each
other roughly in discussions having a bad effect on newcomers
and observers and discouraging involvement, having a plenary
with no effective way for remote participants to ask questions
or make comments sends a negative message about whether such
participation is really desired. Noting that this is not the
first time in recent years at which questions arriving via
Jabber have been ignored in a plenary (at least this time, it
was caught although much too late) or given no attention, a
relatively experienced IETF participant is likely to respond, as
I am doing, by getting on the mailing list. Someone who is new
and trying to understand whether it is possible to participate
effectively in the IETF may, instead, make an obvious inference
and just go away. From that standpoint, an oversight about
Jabber input (whether in a plenary or a WG session) is at least
as problematic as experienced participants and old friends
calling each other bad names in a WG session. If the assorted
mentoring/ guiding programs for f2f participants are going well,
it may be worse because, by midweek, f2f newcomers may know at
least one or two experienced people whom they could go ask what
is going on (or who might spontaneously be approached by those
people with an explanation). We have no such support for
remote newcomers, despite repeated suggestions.
However, there is another aspect to what happened that may be
equally important. Alissa apologized for forgetting to get a
Jabber scribe. I appreciate the apology and agree that she
shouldn't have overlooked it. But the problem is _NOT_ her
fault. Anyone in the room could have noticed the omission and
called it to her attention. No one did. Anyone in the room
who was following the Jabber feed (and I recognized several
people on the Meetecho participant list who where clearly there)
could have noticed either the absence of a designated scribe
(any time in over two hours) or the question (only one hour
before that was noticed and read) and brought it to the
attention of whomever was at the front of the room at the time.
One of the IETF's important features and big advantages over
other SDOs is that we claim to function as a community (not
just, e.g., a collection of representatives of companies) and
mostly succeed at that. But that makes these kinds of glitches
a community problem, not an IETF Chair, IESG, or, in the case of
WGs, a WG Chair problem. If someone notices and doesn't speak
up on the theory that it noticing is someone else's job, that is
a community failure. If a newcomer notices and speaks up, I
hope we can promise a round of applause (at least).
The question itself was about the current status of so-called
internationalization work in the IETF and, in particular, the
status of the recommendations from the BOF on processing that
work at IETF 102. I know at least some of the answer; my reason
for asking is that I wanted to get a reaction from the IESG
because internationalization issues are not confined to the ART
area much less whichever ART AD is currently holding the short
straw. Others may reasonably disagree but I think that, if we
are serious about attracting a diverse set of participants from
around the world, internationalization work is really important.
If we give it minimal attention, we are sending another kind of
message. Missing the window of the IESG part of the plenary
largely defeated the purpose of the question.
Unfortunately, there were two additional problems after the
question was read. First, the person reading it wasn't sure I
was the one who asked it. I was using Jabber over Meetecho.
Due to our participant login procedure, Meetecho knew exactly
who I was and was displaying "John Klensin" (not some initials
or nickname that could be confused) next to the text in the chat
panel. If that information isn't making it through to other
Jabber/XMPP clients or systems, there is a bug that is worth
tracking down and fixing. Then, I gather someone, I presume
from context one of the ART ADs, answered the question from the
floor. But I couldn't hear the answer or the identity of the
person answering at all. The audio was very good through all of
the rest of the meeting so I have to assume that either the
question was answered away from the microphone, the floor mics
had been shut down, or the feed from the mics to Meetecho had
been disconnected. Or course, by the time I could get something
equivalent of "no audio" typed into the Jabber room, the meeting
was over (even if I assumed that, by then, someone was watching
and would report). If the problem was something that could
have been noticed and reported from within the meeting room, the
comments earlier in this note about community responsibility
apply.
Not the IETF's finest moment.
best,
john
