Re: [Gendispatch] draft charter text: terminology-related WG

["Joel M. Halpern" <[e-mail]>]

Watching this debate, I am hoping there is some way to thread this needle.

On the one hand, there are a lot of external indications that language 
usage is causing a significant population problems.  I would like to see 
the IETF as a community recognize that and write down suggestions on 
ways to improve it.

At the same time, I grant that there are a number of other aspects of 
how we do business that create barriers in other ways.   I have seen 
suggestion from various people that I think deserve evaluation. 
However, I am unable to construct a proposed charter that would provide 
any coherence and bounds to such efforts.  And process improvements 
(which is the general category of the proposals I have seen) are hard 
enough even when tightly scoped.  Chartering a new process WG without a 
clear goal is a recipe for wasting a lot of people's time without 
achieving any of the goals.
What I am wondering is if any of the folks who are concerned abut issues 
outside of language selection can draft a charter.  Then we, and the 
IETF, can decide (assuming we agree on the value of the proposal) if the 
two charters should be combined, if we should have two working groups, 
or if we should have only one (and which.)

I don't think it is really fair to the proponents of this proposal to 
object on the grounds that we should do some unspecified different thing.

Yours,
Joel

On 2/13/2021 6:56 PM, Keith Moore wrote:
> On 2/13/21 5:52 PM, Mark Nottingham wrote:
> 
>> This issue is settled in much of tech, so we have strong cowpaths to 
>> pave. As a result, the amount of energy that it will take to create 
>> language guidelines is almost completely determined by how much energy 
>> people put into trying to stop it.
>>
>> If people have legitimate reasons as to why we shouldn't do this, 
>> that's one thing; 'our energy is better spent elsewhere' is not one of 
>> them.
> 
> To me this proposal looks like a DoS attack against actually increasing 
> inclusion in IETF.   Why actually do the hard work when we can fill in a 
> check box and pretend we have virtue?
> 
> If we want to publish a document that talks about exclusionary language, 
> let's just Last Call what we have once or twice (but no more than that) 
> and be done with it.   I don't think a WG is going to improve the 
> document as much as community-wide Last Calls, and IMO a WG on this 
> topic has a lot more potential to do harm than good.
> 
>> No where in the IETF is such an argument acceptable against a charter; 
>> we routinely charter groups that many feel aren't worth the effort, 
>> but I don't get to determine how people in the routing area (for 
>> example) spend their time, as long as there's demonstrated support for 
>> it.
> We're not bound by stare decisis.   We shouldn't use poor past practice 
> to justify poor present or future practice.   That's called propagation 
> of error.
> 
> It's one thing when a WG's topic area only affects people in a narrow 
> area of interest.   If a WG isn't going to create problems for people 
> outside that area of interest, a narrowly focused WG makes sense.
> 
> But this is a topic that potentially affects everyone who writes RFCs. 
> Burying this discussion in a WG that most people probably don't want to 
> fool with, seems likely to produce two results: (1) a document that 
> doesn't earn community-wide consensus (but might end impairing our 
> ability to write RFCs anyway), and/or (2) a lot of people's time spent 
> arguing with people that will be attracted by this topic but who don't 
> have a strong interest in IETF work outside of that topic.
> 
>> If you have better ideas about how to improve inclusivity and 
>> diversity in the IETF, suggest a (parallel) charter. This one will be 
>> judged based upon the interest expressed in it and the legitimacy of 
>> any objections against it -- just as with every other charter.
> 
> Maybe it's not the sort of problem that a working group can reliably 
> solve?     Sometimes a working group is a way of avoiding a problem 
> rather than solving one.
> 
>> OTOH if you're suggesting that the IETF introduce a metric for new 
>> charters that considers priority between different possible efforts, 
>> I'm all for it -- provided that the first item of business is 
>> reviewing ALL current working groups on those criteria.
> 
> Now there's an idea that might be worth discussion.   (Just please don't 
> suggest a working group to review working groups. But a WG to sketch out 
> nonbinding review criteria... maybe.)
> 
> Keith
> 
>