Re: [hrpc] Politics, representation, and the charter (was Re: HRPC recharter)

[Melinda Shore <[e-mail]>]

On 4/18/23 7:47 AM, Niels ten Oever wrote:
> How can you then attribute the misunderstanding to the co-chair or the 
> proposed charter change ?

I don't see that it does, but it also pretty clearly doesn't help.

People both inside and outside the various I*TF organizations
misunderstand the distinctions between the IETF and IRTF.  In
general that's not actually a problem in practice, but it may
be in the HRPC case.  If you take, for example, CFRG, it is
very commonly misunderstood in the cryptographic community to
be an IETF activity (CFRG does produce standards).  But, that
doesn't really affect any other activities or, arguably, CFRG
itself.  However, to the extent that HRPC is misunderstood to
be influencing standards production in the IETF, that can
be (and has been) a problem, in terms of friction with IETF
working groups and the incorrect assumptions being made
about human rights activities in the IETF by governments and
policy makers.  So, I'd argue that the lack of understanding
about the differences is not inherently much of a problem
generally but that it is a problem in the specific case of
HRPC.

Melinda

-- 
Melinda Shore
[e-mail]

Software longa, hardware brevis