What is going wrong? Was: A sad farewell

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

The response below misrepresents the situation completely. Henrik was
working on the new RFC tooling for the HTML format. From what I see, most
participants approve of what they see as improvements.

The issue that I see pervasively in IETF is a system in which people have
authority but not accountability. So people insist on being the one to make
a decision that they can never take because there is no clear indication of
what participants want.

There is a reason the IETF approach is not copied by any other
organization: It doesn't work. Organization of RFC tools process is
particularly convoluted because in addition to the usual IETF denial of the
obvious, there is the additional pretense of the RFC system supporting
multiple independent organizations.

This approach is going to be particularly unsuccessful when you are
employing people to work within it. The employees have no clear lines of
reporting. They will naturally feel they should be responsive to the whole
community, not just the IAB or the chair. But there are no mechanisms that
allow the whole community to provide direction.

A good start would be to recognize some obvious facts:

1) IETF participants SHOULD be treated as if they are members. Telling
people they are not members is silly and insulting. If you want an
inclusive organization, you treat people as members. Amex treats me as a
member, why can't IETF?

2) The RFC formats and publications serve the IETF community which includes
participants in IETF, IRTF and everything else. Nothing set the process up
for unnecessary pain so much as the notion that 'because RFCs are published
by more than just the IETF' the process should not be an IETF one.

3) If there is a point to what we are doing here, we are building the
future. Over the past 25 years, this organization has been the vanguard of
political and social changes that have created and destroyed tens of
millions of jobs. A veteran journalist who has lost their job multiple
times as the century old local papers they worked for has closed might have
a rather uncharitable response to people complaining that they can't work
in nroff. You can't build the 2020s living in the 1970s.



On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 9:40 AM Masataka Ohta <
[e-mail]> wrote:

> Lloyd W wrote:
>
> > I'm becoming convinced that these incidents (losses of experienced
> > RFC Editor and tools contract work) are examples of managing for
> > short-term overheads and cost savings, rather than for longer-term
> > organizational needs and growth.
>
> I disagree.
>
> Those incidents should be caused by people who want to change
> perfectly working situations toward worst possible situations,
> because they want to say that they have performed some work.
>
>                                                 Masataka Ohta
>
>
>