Re: Effective discourse in the IETF

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

On 04-Jul-19 04:27, Salz, Rich wrote:
> The world has moved on, and that’s a good thing. What used to be acceptable in terms of communication, isn’t; the bar has been raised. If the IETF wants to draw from global membership, it’s going to need to modify (and/or mollify) behavior that used to be acceptable. There is a whole wide world of cultures and genders that can, and should, have something to say about how to make the world better, and **we need to be nice** and **we need to be welcoming.** That doesn’t mean we have to accept poor technical solutions, but we can and should do a better job talking to each other.

I worried about this quite a bit when drafting what became the newcomer guidance on the IETF web site. At the moment it says:

"The IETF is normally very welcoming to newcomers, and tolerance is the rule. The technical level is quite high, so if you write something that turns out to be wrong, you may get some quite frank replies. Or sometimes you will get a reply from someone whose first language is not English, and they can be rude without intending it. (If someone is seriously offensive, the WG Chairs are supposed to deal with it.) Don't be discouraged; everybody started as a newcomer."

Whether that is accurate is of course open to discussion.

    Brian
 
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> If you grew up writing RFC’s whose numbers are in the double digits, and you think it’s the same community, you probably need to look around and think again.
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> If your personal philosophy is “I am responsible for my mind, just tell me the facts” then please think of others who don’t share your mental discipline and don’t use your admirable self-control as a justification for you to ignore common courtesy to them.
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> If you’ve worked with folks for years and stand up at the mic, before saying “that’s really stupid” consider how others in the room might be intimidated from contributing, and how much worse off we’ll be because of that loss.
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