Re: [hrpc] I-D Action: draft-irtf-hrpc-political-04.txt

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On Sep 17, 2019, at 9:45 AM, Niels ten Oever <[e-mail]> wrote:
> I have tried in my work in this RG to build a bridge between the IETF and academia. When I write things in IETF/RFC format, people say it is not academic enough, when things are more academic, it is not IETF/RFC enough. I am really at a loss here.

It may be that you have taken on an impossible task.  But let’s assume for a moment that you have not.  If not, then when you are faced with a choice between readability and conformity, which do you think is the right choice to make?

> If you want to be a co-author, I am happy to have you on as one. I am also happy to take pull requests, as you have seen in the past there is an almost 100% acceptance rate for them, as with text suggestions.

I hate to continue to give you a hard time, but this may be part of the problem… :]

>> Anyway, as I read through the rest of the response, it appears that you are simply disagreeing with my viewpoint.
> 
> I am happy to address your viewpoints, but it is hard to navigate suggestions from the RG that are simply going in different directions. 

When we get into situations like this, it might help to step back and ask the question: what is it that we want out of this document?  Why are we doing this?

What I generally want out of documents is that they provide a clear picture of something that we need to understand, but do not all collectively understand well.  They should be written in such a way that with as little effort as possible, I can read them and come away understanding the problem or solution being discussed more clearly.  I can know what the authors opinions are, and where what they said was opinion, and where what they said was intended to be objective.  I can reason about whether it was objective.

Writing documents like this is really hard.  There is nothing to be ashamed of when you don’t succeed at first attempt.

Speaking of academic publishing, it is frequently the case that the goal of the document is not what I stated above.  Because of the “publish or perish” problem, and also the “I need to look smart” problem, and the “I need to signal that I am an academic” problem, much is typically said in the document that has nothing to do with communicating about the ostensible subject of the document.

While we can’t pretend that these pressures don’t exist for authors of IRTF documents, I think it’s worth actually aspiring to produce useful stuff, and to notice when the various pressures of academia distort the writing and make it less useful.

Of course, this is just my opinion.  It may be that there isn’t consensus on this.  There are valid reasons to try to conform to academic forms: if we don’t, there’s a risk that academics won’t take us seriously.  But if we are to compromise in service of that goal, let’s at least understand why it is that we want to be taken seriously, and what our options are for achieving that goal.

At present it feels like it’s a bit contemptuous of academics to suggest that they will not read a useful, clear document because it’s not in the right form.  If there are academics for whom this conjecture is true, are they the ones we want to reach?

What is the good outcome here?   Is it being heard, or is it being influential?   Do we actually have something valuable to say?  Who needs to hear what we have to say?   Why will it be beneficial for them to do so?