On Fri, Mar 27, 2020 at 3:54 AM Andrew Alston <Andrew.Alston@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
This is made even more difficult when in certain cases there is active discouragement of participation.
Being a newbie here (IETF 105 was my first in this community), and arriving from a 30-year career direction at the intersection of applied informatics and economics (while several of my colleagues are full-stack developers), I've been discretely exploring a potential fit for some novel methods that our team have designed, with running code and alpha demo, all licensed free/libre/open. I note: "The IETF is normally very welcoming to newcomers, and tolerance is the rule. The technical level is quite high, so if you write something that turns out to be wrong, you may get some quite frank replies." (How to Start)
I'm pleased to report that almost all interactions with people I've met online or in-person in the IETF community have been very helpful. But I did enjoy one of those "frank" replies just the other day. A week ago I shared a 1-pager and some system documentation links with three long-time IETF contributors who happened to have a new RFC approved for a technical use case that my teams' work would probably complement nicely. (The substance of it is not relevant to the current thread.) Here is what one of those authors wrote back via email on 24 March:
"I read the draft paper. I more or less understand where you are trying to go. I, personally, don’t have any interest in pursuing the mechanisms described there.. I don’t think they will work. I’d rather not get into an argument about them, so no response is necessary. There
will not be a meeting of the xxxxx working group, which is the group
that processed our draft. That work group will be concluding soon."
It's a good thing this is not the usual tone! :-/
To be fair, this respondent did add:
"Anyone
is welcome to publish a draft and propose new work in the IETF. You
get agenda time when people read your draft, like your ideas and are
willing to work with you to bring them to fruition. Given ecrit is
probably concluding, your best bet is to create a draft, submit it, and
ask on the ART Dispatch email list if there is any interest."
Well, I'll share a reflection on three aspects of this reply that in my assessment present dis-incentives to increasing and improving productive participation:
- "I don’t think they will work ... I’d rather not get into an argument", without offering even a smidgeon of a rationale for why the design would not work.
- There will not be a meeting of the xxxxx working group [and it] will be concluding soon" as if standards have finality (without any room for subsequent enhancements, extensions, complementary standards without causing delay to what has been concluded thus far).
- "You
get agenda time when people read your draft, like your ideas and are
willing to work with you", as if incumbents ever "like" and are "willing to work with" potential disrupters.
Considering some of the other comments in this thread, and reading it in combination with ISoc's 2019 Internet Society Global Internet Report: Consolidation in the Internet Economy, may I suggest that the IETF community should be cautious about taking on some characteristics of ye olde OSI. A core theme in David Clark’s “Designing an Internet” (2018) is the need to design a coherent and resilient approach to continued evolution of the Internet in a manner consistent with its core principles. He considers the answer to rest at the intersection of financial, business and technology design: “The ossification of customary business relationships ... may be more of a barrier to innovation than the ossification of technology". (p 251)
Joseph Potvin
Executive Director, Xalgorithms Foundation
Mobile: 819-593-5983
jpotvin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://www.xalgorithms.org
Executive Director, Xalgorithms Foundation
Mobile: 819-593-5983
jpotvin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://www.xalgorithms.org
