On Mon, Mar 25, 2019, at 5:23 PM, Keith Moore wrote:
On 3/25/19 5:13 PM, Stan Kalisch wrote:
On Mon, Mar 25, 2019, at 5:00 PM, Keith Moore wrote:Different people have different ideas about what "unpleasant" means.They do, but what is significant is the common, shared subset of those ideas within a community. That subset alone can significantly determine who is part of a community, and who is not.Agreed. However, some people are accustomed to environments in which criticism of one's technical ideas is interpreted as personal criticism by the one expressing such ideas and/or by others.
Indeed. But what periodically mystifies me about the IETF (not that this is necessarily unique to this organization) is that you would think it could exercise some kind of collective aptitude to focus on those rigorous, sometimes necessarily blunt technical arguments to the general exclusion of the more grandiose, melodramatic indictments a number of people like to make of the thought processes and consciousness of other participants.
I admit there's probably No One Answer to this. Etc.
Thanks,
Stan
In my opinion, such expectations create a dysfunctional environment in which the ability to do good engineering is seriously impaired. I hope IETF doesn't go that way, because I it could make IETF irrelevant. But, sadly, I've seen many signs of this tendency within IETF.(Of course, if criticism of technical ideas is deemed acceptable by a community, an unpleasant person can use such criticism as a proxy for criticism of an individual... which is unfortunate. But if the ideas are good, hopefully there will be people to lend support to them.)That said, I readily admit that as IETF attempts to be hospitable to a more diverse set of people (which is what we need to be doing), it may paradoxically require us to be less diverse in what we as a community consider acceptable behavior.Keith
