Re: Approaching the IETF - A View from Civil Society

[Nick Hilliard <[e-mail]>]

Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote on 27/07/2023 13:28:
> On Wed, Jul 26, 2023 at 04:53:01PM +0000,
>   Andrew Campling <[e-mail]> wrote
>   a message of 147 lines which said:
> 
>> It should be possible to disagree on matters of substance without
>> resorting to ad hominem attacks that question the motivation of an
>> individual, their employer etc.
> 
> People and organisations have goals and agenda. Their proposals and
> opinions do not come out of the blue, they are rooted in their values,
> history, previous actions, etc. For organisations, the goals are often
> explicit (even if organisations also have goals that are a bit hidden)
> and are also expressed via their former declarations. So, it is
> perfectly legitimate to judge a proposal by the person / organisation
> promoting it (like George Michaelson did in his assessment of
> IWF). Also, it is simply necessary: there is no way a reasonable
> person could study everything from scratch, we don't have time for
> that. Deciding on previous knowledge is a normal way of working.

indeed, and there was nothing ad-hominem about George's email.

IWF comes from a very different history to the IETF, and has a set of 
view-points which reflect this.  Whether people on ietf@ like it or not, 
they're not going to go away just because the IETF has a different set 
of opinions, and the same is true of many other organisations who have 
similar positions to the IWF in regard to content blocking and data 
inspection. The onus is on the IETF to engage in a civil and reasonable 
way, with clearly thought-through arguments on points of disagreement.

In relation to drawing conclusions based on who someone's employer is, 
this was the CTO of an organisation formally presenting at an SDO. It's 
pretty ok to assume that what was said was a party viewpoint.

Nick