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

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On Sep 17, 2019, at 8:22 AM, [e-mail] wrote:
> I too am looking for RG guidance.

FWIW, the objections I raised probably a year ago haven’t been addressed yet.  An RG document should make a clear case for whatever point it’s making, but this document doesn’t do that.  The introduction is not really doing the job of an introduction—it starts with several quotes, and never really says what the document is about nor why we should read it.   Section 3 should be the introduction, and could start with the question stated there, and then give an overview of what the document talks about and what research methodology was used.  The quotations in the introduction could either be chucked, or woven in appropriately, but as they are, they just prevent the reader from proceeding further.

The text from the abstract could be useful in the introduction; the abstract itself is meant to be a sales pitch for why you should read further and what the document is about, and so this one is way too long.

The methodology that produced the subsections of 4 is unclear; it seems to be the author summarizing these viewpoints, but the author clearly has opinions about these viewpoints, and the summaries are difficult to follow and full of detail that is really part of the author’s conclusion, and not part of the explanation of the position. So they aren’t really doing the job of helping us to understand the issues.  Furthermore, we don’t know how the author decided to represent just these viewpoints, and no others, nor is there any discussion of the relationships between these views, which I think clearly exist: they are presented as orthogonal.

As an example of the difficulty of following these subsections, consider subsection 4.4.  We have an initial paragraph that explains the topic decently well, followed by a long quotation from Heidegger that explains it better, followed by a paragraph that introduces a new analogy, finally followed by a paragraph that tries to relate these analogies to the Internet and to protocols, but thoroughly fails to do so.  I think part of the reason it fails is that the author is really trying to express his view of how the Internet is analogous to the two examples he has given, and that distorts the analogy enough to make it quite difficult to follow.

There are two major issues with this document as an RG document.  First, I don’t think it is an RG document.  I think it’s the author’s document.  Secondly, it desperately needs a developmental edit.  I think the ideas being expressed here are probably worth expressing, but if it’s going to be Niels’ document, then Niels needs to get some outside feedback to turn it into a good document that says what Niels wants to say in a way is useful to other readers.  And if it’s to be an RG document, then it needs to have more participation from the RG.  In order for that to happen, it probably needs Neils to be a contributing author rather than the editor, and for someone else to take over the editorial role.