[apps-discuss] Last Call conduct redux (Was: Last Call: <draft-ietf-appsawg-nullmx-05.txt> (A NULL MX Resource Record for Domains that Accept No Mail) to Proposed Standard)

[Pete Resnick <[e-mail]>]

This message is admittedly 4 days too late. In my opinion, we area 
directors got caught out not paying attention and did not act to address 
problematic behavior on this list in a reasonable amount of time, and 
haven't been doing so for some time. The IESG is taking this ongoing 
behavior seriously, and you'll see some discussion in the next few days 
about how we intend to address it. But this particular thread had some 
serious misbehavior, that behavior came from senior members of the 
community, and it needs to be called out in particular.[1]

Of course we need to learn to focus our review comments and discussions 
at Last Call, we need to make concrete and constructive suggestions for 
changes (preferably supplying text), and when we respond to reviews we 
should filter superfluous commentary and solicit specific 
recommendations where they were missing. But this is general advice and 
not an issue of the kind of misconduct I'm referring to. The problem in 
this thread came when, instead of constructively responding to the 
initial posting and simply filtering out non-constructive comments, the 
responses and continuing conversation served to *raise* the temperature 
instead of lowering it. Engaging in sarcasm, belittling of comments, 
baiting rhetorical questions, and aggressive (whether directly or 
passive-aggressive) commentary drives some folks away from the 
discussion (or participation in general), causes other folks to think 
that it's acceptable behavior, and causes further discussion to degrade.

Luckily this thread seems to have converged, and I think it would be 
terribly unproductive to argue about the merits and demerits of this 
particular thread on this list, but this kind of behavior needs to stop. 
That requires everyone to commit to trying harder to engage civilly, and 
to not tolerate misbehavior. That doesn't mean that you should take it 
upon yourself to police and control other people's behavior; that only 
serves to compound the problem. But if discussions are not being 
appropriately moderated, you should bring that to the attention of the 
ADs; we are committing to making sure that things improve.

pr

[1] You may react to this by saying, "There has been far worse behavior 
on this list in recent years. Why pick on this particular thread?" The 
answer is, we have to start somewhere, and it happens that several 
people, including some of the participants in this thread, made specific 
complaints about his particular case.

-- 
Pete Resnick<http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. - [phone]