Re: Bad/Good ideas and damage control by experienced participants

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

On Tue, Jun 21, 2022 at 10:33 AM Nick Hilliard <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Miles Fidelman wrote on 21/06/2022 15:12:
> > Good point.  The lack of awareness of  basic design philosophy
> > (interoperability, avoiding walled gardens, etc.) is appalling.
> >
> > It seems like, these days, all people do is promulgate broken mechanisms
> > (e.g., DMARC), in the name of blocking resource sharing & collaboration
> > - bringing us back to the days of a walled gardens and closer to the
> > days of the Tower of Babel, at the same time no less.  And they do it,
> > largely, by going around IETF processes entirely.
>
> the issue is not whether this is true, but how it is presented to people
> who stumble on the same blocks that we stumbled on when we started.
>

How the point is made makes a huge difference. And here it is important to
remember that TechBro culture is a real thing and it isn't just the bros
who engage in making the toxic workplaces more toxic.

Consider for example,

"That was proposed but I forget why we didn't do it"
"That was proposed but we didn't do it because problem X was a higher
priority"
"That keeps being proposed, the problem is X"

Versus

"That won't work"
"Dude, you keep making stupid suggestions"
"Keeps coming up but it is just as stupid"

Now admittedly, some of those are from Twitter but I have seen similar in
IETF.

The worse attack though is when someone in a position of power decides to
block your proposal by refusing to process it. The proposal that is never
put to the group for adoption as was promised, the last call that is
referred to a directorate which spends 12 months reviewing it, the appeal
that is submitted but ignored for 6 months while the document being
appealed became an RFC.

I am really unimpressed by the claim that IETF process represents consensus.