--On Saturday, October 5, 2019 11:07 +1300 Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On the underlying point - the fuzziness of the community > boundary - I really don't believe in magic, or that the > community we should worry about is 7.7 billion people. But we > would be deluding ourselves to think that we can count the > members of the community; we can't even count the members of > the IETF. So we really have to accept, IMHO, that there is an > open-ended public service responsibility here, not just a > responsibility to a well-defined closed community. And if an > obscure network operator in Northern Elbonia has a comment to > make on an RFC from 1969 tagged in the index as "(Status: > UNKNOWN)", that is automatically part of the community > discourse, even though we don't know which stream that RFC > belongs to. I think this is key although I look at it a bit differently. Nothing I've said implied that we should be seeking consensus of, much less speaking for, several billion people (nor trying to enumerate them). I don't think we should even be trying to determine consensus among ISOC members or ISOC chapters even though we presumably could get them enumerated if we asked nicely. At the same time, we know they are out there. We can identify many of the communities and at least crudely describe their needs. We should not presume we can identify all possible communities or get the description of any one of them and their needs exactly right. We don't even make that presumption about the community of active IETF participants and that is one reason we talk only about "rough consensus" and not "strong consensus" or "broad consensus". To those communities who are part of the global Internet community and whom we can identify, we owe a real, good-faith, effort to try to make educated guesses at their needs and to take what Brian calls an open-ended public service responsibility and what I described earlier as acting as trustees for that broader community. We also have some obligation to keep looking for and identifying those smaller communities and clusters, rather than, in the extreme case, either no one we cannot precisely identify or no one who is not an active IETF participant, actually counts. best, john
