Two quick observations... --On Monday, February 17, 2020 12:03 -0500 Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >... > Many things Internet have scaled. The IETF ain't one of them. > Some people are still insisting that it work in the same way > as 25 years ago. How can that make sense. Just in case I'm one of the people you have in mind, I'm not only not insisting the the IETF work the way it did 25 years ago, I think that trying to do that would be a disaster. Keith can speak for himself but I don't think he is advocating any such thing either, nor have I seen anyone else on this list doing so. If things that I've said sound that way, either I have not been clear (in which case I apologize) or people are making assumptions about what I'm saying without actually reading my notes. A third possibility is that people are making up positions to attribute to those with whom they disagree and then attacking those positions, a tactic that I assume was in poor repute even before Aristotle alluded to it more than two millennia ago, but you have too much integrity to do that. To be clear, I think many of the changes in the IETF over the last 25 years are very exciting. I'm particularly encouraged by the increasing diversity of our participation, especially increased geographic and linguistic diversity. I think we have not adapted well to those changes. I also applaud the moves toward making the IETF a kinder and more professional place, especially when dealing with people who may be new to the community or who may be offering unusual perspectives even when I worry about the mechanisms that were designed to protect people from rude or bullying behavior when those mechanisms are used to suppress dissent, especially dissent from positions taken by the leadership. Coming back to the discussions of the last few days, I think that moves in the direction of more and/or longer and more expensive meetings are exactly the wrong direction to be going, if only because they work against participation by, and fairness toward, a very broad range of people with different backgrounds and perspectives. I think we have gotten somewhat more into a situation in which people take leadership roles to advance their careers and try to hold onto them rather than doing them for a short time out of obligation to the community. That, in turn, as almost anyone who survived an undergraduate course in either organizational behavior or bureaucracy learned, tends to lead to behaviors that entrench the leadership, expand organizational and organizational support roles, and trends toward more top-down decision making. Because the kinds of roles those trends tend to develop also make it nearly impossible for anyone without solid organizational support to assume time-consuming leadership roles, it takes exceptional people who have gotten used to that type of support to remain sensitive to the needs of those who are more constrained by levels of support, language, distance and so on. The IETF has been lucky in having more of those exceptional people than we may deserve, but that has not prevented symptoms from appearing (some of which have been discussed by you and others lately). I also want to stress that I said "tends" and "trends": I'm not accusing anyone of bad behavior, much less acting in bad faith, just that the IETF is not immune from the situations that develop certain behavior in most organizations like it. Maybe that is actually the right way to go rather than responding to the trends by compensating for them or pushing back. But, if it is, we probably should be investigating the kinds of safeguards that other standards bodies who have found themselves in similar situations have established to prevent dominance by small clusters of interests and the loss of credibility that tends to go with such dominance. I am not at all certain that much of this is about scaling. It may have much more to do with organizational changes, some as the IETF matures and some as the world around us changes. I could go on but probably no one would read the note (if anyone has gotten even this far given the number of notes I've gotten, some offline and quite aggressive, suggesting that, if I cannot or will not boil everything I have to say down to a few pithy sentences and/or emoji. > W3C didn't scale either, we ended up having to create OASIS. Huh? According to my memory and their web site, OASIS is the renamed descendant of an SGML-oriented both created in around 1993. I remember organizational and Advisory Committee of W3C in the last half of that decade, so it is a bit hard for me to figure out how scaling problems with W3C were diagnosed early enough to lead to a new organization in 1993. best, john
