Re: discussion style and respect

["Joel M. Halpern" <[e-mail]>]

I find myself in the middle on this.
Spending a lot of time on use case documents, and deciding which use 
case documents you will adopt (the answer usually being all) is not 
productive.
But not having agreement on the problem, or conversely having agreement 
on the solution whatever the problem really is, also produces veyr bad 
results.

We have, many times, managed to thread our way in between these various 
extremes.  From what I have seen, that usually works better.  (It also 
helps if there are actually enouhg people willing to do the work.)

Yours,
Joel

On 6/13/15 5:36 PM, Melinda Shore wrote:
> On 6/13/15 12:22 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>> On 14/06/2015 01:19, John C Klensin wrote:
>>> ...   However, if a WG is
>>> started with a "solution" and a group of people behind it, there
>>> are some bad effects:
>> Yes, and this is certainly a very real situation. I've personally
>> experienced it in the past, and am currently experiencing it
>> (without belligerence, fortunately).
>
> I'm actually pretty ambivalent about this one.  I'd much
> rather see things coming in that are relatively well-baked
> than see proposals that are just problem descriptions.
> It seems to me to be a more productive use of energy to
> negotiate engineering differences than it is go try to
> figure out whether or not a given problem statement reflects
> an actual problem that somebody is really experiencing, or
> if there's the ability to come up with a useful solution.
> Yes, it can be heated and horrible (and I actually left the
> IETF for several years in part because of my experience
> along these lines in one particular working group), but
> I think we're better off figuring out how to deal with
> these situations than we are going with the problem statement/
> use case/gap analysis model, which is really beginning to
> annoy me as unproductive, slow, and unmoored to much that's
> useful.
>
> Melinda
>
>