Re: [Gendispatch] Updating the IETF Discussion List Charter (was: Fwd: New Version Notification for draft-eggert-bcp45bis-02.txt)

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 7/4/22 06:40, Lars Eggert wrote:

> the community discussion around BCP45bis (which is now RFC9245) made it very clear that at least part of the community does not want me or the IESG to take a lead in this space.
>
> So while I'd be happy to facilitate a discussion - including hums at the plenary if that is deemed useful - any effort here should be community-driven.
>
> (I believe Eliot Lear has recently posted about starting a team to work on a "new model for plenary", for which something like this may be in scope. There may be other activities that I am unaware of.)

IMO a community-driven discussion inherently requires dealing with lots 
of different views of "the problem", or perhaps even whether there is 
"a" problem, no problem, multiple problems, multiple layers, etc.

Just to cite one example, people keep saying that our discussion style 
deters newcomers as if somehow that by itself is a sufficient reason to 
make drastic changes.   But it's possible that our discussion style, or 
at least some of it, is necessary given that we're trying to build 
consensus among a diverse set of people who all have different 
points-of-view, and different views of a situation.   It takes time to 
converge, to distill out the major points on which a discussion hinges.

This might indeed deter some newcomers because they're unfamiliar with 
it, and unaware of the need for it.   Indeed, it's often uncomfortable 
even for those who are accustomed to it and who accept the need for 
it.   But the solution in this case might be to do a better job of 
educating newcomers, than to prematurely narrow discussion to hums on a 
discrete set of topics.   Hums can be misleading if the questions aren't 
skillfully framed.   And hums can be deliberately misleading if the 
questions are skillfully framed to mislead people or to force them into 
particular directions. [*]

I do firmly believe that we could improve how we organize some 
discussions, e.g. that we could reasonably have rules to limit debate on 
any topic to a particular time period, or once the debate is looping.  
(I define looping as sending basically the same message more than twice, 
without adding anything new. Though sometimes the "new" can be 
subtle.)   I also think there is potential benefit to encouraging better 
discussion practices even if they're not enforced by rules.   But I also 
think there's a real danger here of creating new rules that will hinder 
development of real consensus even more than we already have.

Keith

[*] For those who want examples, please consider that politicians are 
experts at framing questions in misleading ways, and getting the public 
to accept such framing.   But if I were to cite examples from politics I 
suspect they'd be both divisive, and distracting from the subject of how 
IETF should conduct its discussions.   So I'll trust that readers can 
think of their own examples from their own experiences.