Re: Conclusion of the last call on draft-housley-two-maturity-levels

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On Sep 2, 2011, at 5:36 PM, [e-mail] wrote:

>> In looking through this discussion, I see:
> 
>> - People saying that moving from 3 steps to 2 steps is a small step in the
>> right direction, lets do it. Many people who have said this (including I) have
>> been silent for a while quite possibly because they have gotten frustrated with
>> the endless discussion.
> 
> Ross, I'm right there with you. I fully support this document at worse a small
> incremental step that clears away the some brush (at best it may actually turn
> out to be quite valuable) and I'm completely frustrated that this discussion is
> continuing.
> 
> This really needs to stop now. And yes, some people aren't happy with the
> outcome. Thems the breaks.

As far as our process is concerned, the question is, do we have rough consensus to accept it?  I think it's dubious that we have such consensus, and apparently so do others.   

Personally I think this proposal is Mostly Harmless, so I'm willing to hold my nose about it.   But I'm very concerned about the argument that the default assumption should be that we change our process even in the absence of consensus to do so.   

Regarding the proposal, I get the impression that people are mostly in three camps:

1) Even if this is a baby step, it's a step in the right direction.  Or even if it's not a step in the right direction, taking some step will at least make it possible to make some changes in our process.  Maybe we'll not like the results of taking this step, but at least then we'll have learned something, and if the result is clearly worse we'll be motivated to change it.  
(I call this "change for the sake of change")

2) Fixing the wrong problem doesn't do anything useful, and will/may serve as a distraction from doing anything useful.  
(I call this "rearranging the deck chairs")

3) People should stop arguing about this and just hold their noses about it, because the arguing will make it harder to do anything else in this space.  
(I call this "Oceana has always been at war with Eurasia".  Ok, that's probably too harsh, but it's what immediately comes to mind.)

All of these are defensible theories.    As it happens, I don't believe #1 applies in this space, I do believe #2, and I have to admit that #3 does happen.  

The arguments that people are giving in favor of approving this bother me more than the proposal itself does.  (I'm a firm believer that good decisions are highly unlikely to result from flawed assumptions, and flawed assumptions often affect many decisions.  So challenging a widely-held flawed assumption is often more important than challenging any single decision.)

The core problem, I suspect, is that we don't really have any consensus on what IETF's role is.   Is it to help ensure that the Internet works well?  Or is it to enable vendors to ship products that use new/updated protocols as quickly as possible?  These two aren't diametrically opposed, but there's a fair amount of tension between them.

Keith