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

[Mark Nottingham <[e-mail]>]

> On 14 Feb 2021, at 10:56 am, Keith Moore <[e-mail]> 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.

I think that would work if we didn't have a small group of people who vocally and continually insert ever-shifting arguments against this. Under those conditions, it's normal practice for a WG to be formed; AD-sponsored is always tenuous, and not really built for contentious issues.


>> 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.

This isn't a court, Kieth, and I'm not invoking some higher authority. Since 'poor practice' here is subjective (and I suspect highly contentious), labelling it as propagation of error is presumptuous on your part. 

But please, try the experiment: choose a random BoF and make the argument that you don't think people should be spending their time that way, and that you have better (yet currently vague) ideas -- see how it goes for you and report back.


> 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.

These arguments can be made about any WG -- and looking down the list of current WGs, I see several that were successfully chartered despite their applicability. So let's find out, shall we?


--
Mark Nottingham   https://www.mnot.net/