Re: [hrpc] re history lessons

[Eliot Lear <[e-mail]>]

Hi Corinne,

First and foremost, best wishes on your defense!


> On 6 May 2021, at 09:07, Corinne Cath <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Hiya,
> 
> I think part of the question is also whether the inclusion of a human rights section in RFCs is the only way to judge the effects of the HRPC group.

Yes.

> 
> In my PhD, I track the ways in which having these discussions in the IETF/IRTF has changed the sensibilities of engineers in terms of what type of "social" concerns they consider to be relevant to their work.
> 
> This is much harder to measure quantitatively, as it speaks to change in naturalized ways of seeing the world, but in addition to doing ethnographic work like I did, I think it might also be interesting to do further analysis of mailinglists as Colin suggests.


I would add one other aspect, and this is entirely subjective, anecdotal, and I could be entirely wrong, but… my feel is that the participant mix at the IETF has changed dramatically over the last twenty years, with less of a focus on L3 technologies, and more of a focus on transport and security.  People have argued that the neck of the hourglass is now HTTP and not IP.  With the advent of LetsEncrypt and with centralization of services, this has permitted something of a focus on HR at those layers where it simply wasn’t previously practicable.

Another possibility to consider is that there may have been a bit of a Gartner hyper effect in play, where you get that initial zing of interest a’la Edward Snowden, then a lull, and then slow but steady adoption of more mature principles.  And some of that is well above us and well into the application layer (a’la https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/05/apple-airtags-stalking/ <https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/05/apple-airtags-stalking/>).  One wonders what the IETF could ever do about such a thing.  But certainly there are things within our control, and the application of RFC 8280 over time will be worth studying.

Eliot