Bad/Good ideas and damage control by experienced participants (was: Harassment, abuse, accountability. and IETF mailing lists)

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 6/13/22 19:06, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:

> I am mostly in agreement with Tim except that I have also met the 
> 'reverse victim' tactic where the person whose general unpleasantness 
> and aggressive behavior caused the code of conduct to be introduced in 
> the first place weaponizes it by making a series of challenges.

> The issue I think we need to focus on is what are the criteria that 
> maximize the scope for open discussion without people being shut down 
> by deliberate rudeness or for that matter unintentional rudeness or 
> people playing political games.
>
> I know that when I make a proposal and the first four responses are of 
> the form 'that is already being done by <new proposal>' that this is 
> the result of someone involved in <new proposal> seeing a potential 
> competitor and sending an email round to their mates telling them to 
> jump on the thread quick in the hope of squashing the threat.
>
> I also know that when someone says my proposal is good but it 
> absolutely MUST be built on top of some scheme that was developed 
> years back but never made it to deployment that they are trying to 
> make me carry their boat anchor for them.
>
> I also know that whenever someone says 'we can't spend time 
> considering alternative design proposals because it is absolutely 
> essential that this be deployed in 12 months' that the proposed WG is 
> doomed and I can expect to be the SECDIR reviewer for something pretty 
> similar to what was rejected on the grounds of insufficient time 
> roughly 8 years later.
>
> But most folk don't know to expect that sort of behavior.
>
>
<SOAPBOX>
I think the example that Tim cited is both ageist and misandrist, and 
the implication that participants with that attitude should be somehow 
favored seems extremely dubious to me.   I don't know why denigrating 
people because of their age and/or gender and/or facial hair color is 
any better than prejudice based on race, sexual presentation or 
preference, body size or shape, nationality or ethnicity, religion, 
etc.   Clearly those who are old enough to have grey beards should have 
had the decency to die already, or at least to Know Their Places.   Some 
people seem to think that this kind of prejudice is acceptable, and that 
others should naturally agree with it and support it.

We have a long way to go as a species.
</SOAPBOX>

But I suspect that his example (and your message, PHB) also illustrates 
a phenomenon that exists in IETF, what I've sometimes called "damage 
control" but that's actually a poor name.

Experienced participants know that once an idea gets momentum, it's 
difficult to stop it or to steer it in a different direction.    This 
can be true for Good Ideas, Bad Ideas, Good Ideas for which success 
requires solving some difficult or unsolved problem, ideas that are 
aligned with your interest, and/or ideas that you see as contrary to 
your interest.

So there's a common practice of trying hard to nip some kinds of ideas 
in the bud, especially prior to forming a WG.    Because once a WG gets 
a charter there's a strong expectation in the community that it's going 
to be allowed to produce RFCs, and that IESG is going to approve those 
RFCs in some form, even if those ideas really are horrible or the 
resulting RFCs are horrible. And while attempts to fix fundamental 
problems in charter wording are often unsuccessful, attempts to fix them 
at Last Call time are usually even less successful.   So there's a 
narrow window in time to keep this from happening.

Experienced IETF participants (regardless of the color of their facial 
hair or whether they have any) understand this phenomenon, so they 
naturally try to work the process to improve anticipated outcomes.  And 
it's at least possible that wisdom conferred by experience better 
enables one to have a better sense of which ideas are Good, Bad, or 
otherwise.   On the other hand, sometimes less experienced people are 
right, because they haven't been burned by choices made in the distant 
past that aren't being made any more, or which are less relevant than 
they once were. Experience is far from infallible, and some people are 
wise beyond their years.

I do think that inherently Bad Ideas and some inherently Good Ideas 
exist, with a lot of in-between.  But it's often hard to prove that an 
idea is Bad or Good, especially before a WG is actually formed.    Often 
we don't know how Bad or Good an idea is until it's had several years of 
deployment, after which of course it's even harder to get rid of 
them.    (I won't cite examples here because that would be unnecessarily 
divisive, but I'm sure that many of us have no trouble finding some.)

It's hard to see how to avoid the situation entirely.  WGs invest years 
in their work, and nobody wants to see years of their work thrown away 
even if/when they realize that the result is like sausage in the worst 
(sorry) ways.

But we might at least explicitly recognize why this happens and point it 
out to newcomers, so they're not surprised by it.   Maybe we could 
recognize and record expressed concerns, and expect WGs and/or document 
authors to explicitly state whether and how they've addressed those 
concerns as their documents evolve. Maybe we could learn a bit from 
agile practices that try to adapt designs along with emerging 
understanding of their consequences, rather than trying to anticipate 
and solve every problem up front.   Maybe that would reduce some of the 
pressure to anticipate every problem before WG charter time and Last 
Call time.

I think it's a real problem, but I emphatically disagree with the ageist 
and misandrist expression of that problem.

Keith