Re: Recent threads concerning sergeants-at-arms

[Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]>]

Hi Alissa,

I fully agree with your mail with two minor caveats. I hope
those may be useful input to IESG discussion on this, hence
this mail.

#1 I don't think continuing to discuss the SOW/RSE role on
the IETF list as well as or instead of the rfc-interest
list is at all unreasonable if that's what a poster wants
to do, despite us asking for discussion to move to the
rfc-interest list. For this one, I think the onus is on
whomever needs to be up to speed with that discussion
to monitor both and there are enough different opinions
on related topics that I can imagine someone having what
they consider a reasoned argument why moving discussion
to rfc-interest is wrong.

#2 I'd like to suggest a phrase you used is a bit too
broad. You said:

On 03/09/2019 02:51, Alissa Cooper wrote:
> a firmer commitment to building a respectful environment

I've two quibbles with how you expressed that.

I think we want an environment where we are all respectful
of the people participating (or not participating) in the
IETF, but we explicitly do not want participants to be
overly respectful of the (current) organisational structures,
nor of the fact that one us happens to be in a certain role
etc. That does differ from bring "professional" at least
as that term is understood by some reasonable people. How
to phrase that well is tricky but I'd say doable if we
somewhere explicitly note that the kind of openness we
aim for requires us to encourage criticism of the subsets
of us acting in leadership roles, and of the roles as well,
and that such criticism ought be actively encouraged, as
long as it's not personally disrespectful. And as a
corollary, as nomcom appointees we ought not take ourselves,
nor that we're acting in particular roles, too seriously:-)

Secondly, we also do not want IETF participants to be
shy criticising what they consider technically bad ideas.
That's an area where some of us go wrong when we step over
lines between criticism of ideas and get too close to being
critical of other IETF participants. (For example by
imputing motives, which can be done very politely and
tangentially but is nonetheless wrong.) I think there's
definitely room for improvement here, (myself included)
but I'm less sure how to ensure that improvement doesn't
also damage the culture of openly criticising ideas. So
yes, let's work on being better, but carefully, and taking
into account the subtle differences between the IETF and
a company, university, or other kinds of organisation.
(In some respects, I think we're much more like a largely
volunteer-driven amateur-sports organisation, which has
different needs, and dangers, compared to a regular
for-profit company or even a professional-sports setup.)

I guess we may agree that those quibbles need to be handled
in IESG discussion of this topic, but do think there's real
value in explicitly aiming at preserving one of what I think
is the best bits of IETF culture, being folks' willingness to
openly disagree. We absolutely need to be better at doing
that, (for example, avoiding endless repetition of well-worn
arguments that'll never be resolved;-) but we cannot stop
disagreeing or I think we're organisationally dead.

Cheers,
S.