[Diem] Re: Some high-level thoughts on scoping

[Dennis Jackson <[e-mail]>]

Hi Bill,

On 30/06/2024 03:22, Bill Woodcock wrote:

> I would suggest that the IETF is not in the business of crafting 
> standards to describe individual products built for individual 
> organizations, but instead is in the business of crafting open 
> standards that solve issues of interoperability between multiple 
> stakeholders. The former don’t require standardization, while the 
> latter can only exist with standardization.

I think this is a fairly serious misunderstanding of the role the 
emblems play.

The emblems are applied by the appropriate protected parties (inc 
medical facilities, the ICRC and national societies) on a broad range of 
software / services / devices. The emblems are consumed by parties to 
armed conflict on their own software / services / devices.

Although the ICRC has a privileged role to play in stewarding the 
emblem, the emblem is used by a wide variety of stakeholders in all 
manners of conflicts and critically is used to convey information 
between different and possibly hostile stakeholders using very different 
implementations. It is emphatically something that needs standardization.

Best,
Dennis