On Mon, Mar 16, 2020 at 04:29:12PM +0100,
Vittorio Bertola <vittorio.bertola=40open-xchange.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
a message of 93 lines which said:
> I am not sure of which IETF list is appropriate for this. It
> concerns relationships with non-technical stakeholders and their
> representation in the standards-making process,
Well, it is mostly about what happens after (deployment of
standards, not definition of standards). As such, it has very few
requests specifically for IETF. Except:
> It formulates (section 8.1) six recommendations, of which the sixth
> is specifically aimed at the IETF and other Internet standards
> organizations:
> "Standardisation processes are advised to include a consultation
> phase with government and industry policy makers, and civil society
> experts."
As noted by several people here, the governements don't ask for a
voice (they already have it) but for a power of decision. One can
imagine what would have happened of RFC 1984 in such "consultation".
> There is also a page (section 7.13) discussing "Communication
> from/to the IETF", and how to make it better.
>From my experience, communicating with governements is very
frustrating: they don't listen and they hate being challenged ("if you
don't want to add backdoors, it means you support terrorism and,
worse, illegal file-sharing".)
Communicating with users is very important, of course, and we could
certainly do better in that respect. But just saying so is useless: it
is also necessary to explain how to do it better (communicating with
people who have other fields of expertise is hard, and you don't learn
it at engineering schools) and with which budget (it takes time and
dedication). ISOC does a good job here (see for instance
<https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/policybriefs/>), a lot of
other IETF participants do it on their own (I suspect the report would
like to have some sort of official outreach from the IETF; I don't see
why it is necessary, except may be because UN bodies want to
communicate with institutions, not people.) Practical advices on how
to improve that is welcome, not general "something should be done".
