Re: "community" for the RFC series

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

Hi Stephen,

On 06-Oct-19 00:20, Stephen Farrell wrote:
> 
> Hiya,
> 
> On 05/10/2019 09:02, John C Klensin wrote:
>>
>>
>> --On Saturday, October 5, 2019 11:07 +1300 Brian E Carpenter
>> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>>> On the underlying point - the fuzziness of the community
>>> boundary - I really don't believe in magic, or that the
>>> community we should worry about is 7.7 billion people. But we
>>> would be deluding ourselves to think that we can count the
>>> members of the community; we can't even count the members of
>>> the IETF. So we really have to accept, IMHO, that there is an
>>> open-ended public service responsibility here, not just a
>>> responsibility to a well-defined closed community. And if an
>>> obscure network operator in Northern Elbonia has a comment to
>>> make on an RFC from 1969 tagged in the index as "(Status:
>>> UNKNOWN)", that is automatically part of the community
>>> discourse, even though we don't know which stream that RFC
>>> belongs to.
>>
>> I think this is key although I look at it a bit differently.
>> Nothing I've said implied that we should be seeking consensus
>> of, much less speaking for, several billion people (nor trying
>> to enumerate them).
> 
> That's not how I read what you and Brian wrote TBH. I did
> and still do think that both of you are saying that anyone
> affected by the Internet should somehow "count" (in the
> future of the RSE discussion) and ISTM that that does end
> up setting up someone to grandiosely claim to be speaking
> for the entire planet. (I hope none of us really want to
> try do that;-) Again, I'd love to be corrected but that's
> how I've read your and Brian's mails on this so far.

Let me try to answer this by example. Who do you think is in the
community to which RFC7258 (BCP188) is relevant? Or RFC1984,
for that matter. These may be outliers, but that doesn't take
them out of scope.


> ISTM that damages the argument that there's more than the
> IETF involved - if we can't characterise (characterise, not
> "count") the "who else" in some sensible manner then we do
> kinda end up where Christian seemed to be starting from.

The IRTF is easily identified. The various operator groups and
the RIRs and their customers/members. ISOC and its chapters.
The SDOs that we have formal or informal relationships with.
All product developers and open source developers who implement
RFCs. Government regulators (think cryptography, privacy, network
neutrality). The courts, when IPR issues come up. I don't think
it's at all hard to cite large groups that are affected. What's
hard is knowing when to stop.
 
> And just to be clear, I at least have said nothing about
> calling consensus for any such grouping.

No, indeed not. Calling for comments is easy enough, but calling for
consensus isn't plausible. But I don't think that's what John and I
are saying. 

Regards
   Brian

> I think we'd be
> jumping too far ahead in worrying about that right now TBH.
> I'd first like to know the kinds (not numbers, kinds) of
> people involved and then worry abut how they might be
> consulted.
> 
> Cheers,
> S.
> 
> PS: "ISOC chapters" (and I guess ISOC members if there are
> some uninvolved in the IETF) is another totally credible set
> of people that ought be considered. The HOWTO for consulting
> them also seems easy enough which is good.
> 
>> I don't think we should even be trying to
>> determine consensus among ISOC members or ISOC chapters even
>> though we presumably could get them enumerated if we asked
>> nicely.   At the same time, we know they are out there.  We can
>> identify many of the communities and at least crudely describe
>> their needs.  We should not presume we can identify all possible
>> communities or get the description of any one of them and their
>> needs exactly right.   We don't even make that presumption about
>> the community of active IETF participants and that is one reason
>> we talk only about "rough consensus" and not "strong consensus"
>> or "broad consensus".  To those communities who are part of the
>> global Internet community and whom we can identify, we owe a
>> real, good-faith, effort to try to make educated guesses at
>> their needs and to take what Brian calls an open-ended public
>> service responsibility and what I described earlier as acting as
>> trustees for that broader community.  We also have some
>> obligation to keep looking for and identifying those smaller
>> communities and clusters, rather than, in the extreme case,
>> either no one we cannot precisely identify or no one who is not
>> an active IETF participant, actually counts.
>>
>> best,
>>    john
>>