Re: [Gendispatch] IETF transparency and diversity

[Nico Williams <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Apr 09, 2021 at 03:56:37PM -0400, Tony Rutkowski wrote:
> The observation that the IETF's problems today extend well beyond
> anticompetitive behavior seems spot on.  The participant and work item
> metrics show that major contemporary specification development and
> engagement today have shifted rather massively to venues like 3GPP.  The
> IETF remains stagnant.  Large numbers of academics flow in and out to mine
> ideas and advance their academic studies.  Few companies want to pursue
> anything there anymore except for a comparative handful trying to leverage a
> few more years and dollars out of legacy technologies.

Maybe we should close the IETF.  Those participants who think we should
close the general list might well agree with that.

> The tendencies in the IETF to be abusive and intolerant - especially to
> people who are apostates - has unfortunately been standard practice in the
> IETF in the past few decades.  If you reject the religious mandates of the
> IETF, you are declared "off topic," or fail to get a group started, or told
> to go elsewhere - often in abusive ways.  The intolerant behavior is
> especially difficult for those in many non-Western cultures.  These are the
> bigger problems of the IETF.

Yes.  For example, forming BTNS WG was painful in that way.  The new
DANISH mailing list might lead to a DANISH WG, and I expect it too would
run into bullying.  You should see the TLS DANE extension sturm und
drang of a couple of years ago -- it was awful, and it set everyone
involved back quite a bit.

And that's *tehcnical* disagreements.

What we see in this instance is that maxim that debate is all the more
acrimonious as the stakes go down.  Because... nothing will change if we
adopt a terminology BCP, we can and do argue the most strenuously about
it.  If draft-knodel-terminology were published, I'd be upset for
reasons I've given (most notably that casting aspersions on the
community is way over the line), but in fact nothing at all of note
would change, and world peace would be as elusive as ever.  It should
not be surprising then that this has been the most acrimonious debate at
IETF in a long time.

Maybe we should all just move to OASIS and pay to have our protocols
standardized without an IESG around and without much opposition because
anyone who thinks something should be done differently can pay to have
their variation standardized.

> All organisations are largely incapable of analysing themselves and
> understanding their strengths and weakness in the larger ecosystem.  The
> tendency is to reject criticism - even when it is essential.  It seems worth
> not only maintaining a generic discourse list, but to encourage dissident
> and critical participation without dismissing commentarity as rhetorical and
> pile-on behavior.  Occasional good humour would also help.

Corporate and military organizations can do it, if they get lucky,
because all it takes is someone at the top with the right vision,
skills, and will power.  We're not such an organization.  We have egos
in the way.

Nico
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