Re: Bad/Good ideas and damage control by experienced participants (was: Harassment, abuse, accountability. and IETF mailing lists)

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 6/14/22 01:45, Barry Leiba wrote:

> I'm not arguing that issue.  I think the people Tim quoted (or
> paraphrased) were pointing out where they saw the bad treatment coming
> from.  The issue to me isn't*who*  is doing it, as I really don't care
> to focus on that.  It's that it's a long-term culture that they're
> seeing play out.  I agree with that: I think we DO have a long-term
> culture of accepting bad behaviour toward each other, and I think we
> need to change that culture.  And we need to do it clearly, strongly,
> and as a group.

Perhaps, though it still seems to me that much of what's being termed 
"bad behavior" is really fairly subjective and arbitrary.

But I don't think Tim's example is even illustrative of a long-term 
culture of accepting bad behavior, unless the bad behavior of the 
individuals quoted.  It's not inherently bad to be critical of a 
proposal, and the judgment of newcomers as to what makes a good or bad 
proposal is... perhaps not the metric we should be measuring ourselves 
against.   For every IETF participant that I've seen being too critical, 
I've seen 10 newcomers come to IETF thinking that their proposal is 
brilliant and really being shocked when it was evaluated critically.

In some sense, being critical is our job.   We're critical to try to 
filter out bad proposals and also to see how to make promising ones 
better.  But newcomers aren't always going to see it that way.   Even 
those well-experienced in the industry may not have seen their proposals 
subjected to so many different points-of-view before.   But the variety 
of points-of-view is one of IETF's strengths.

What I'd like to see, however, is better criticism, more thoughtful and 
insightful criticism, criticism that shows evidence of wisdom.   I have 
the impression that too many IETF'ers shoot from the hip, even when 
they're right.   And that's also something we can address, e.g. by not 
expecting BOF or WG criticism to be made on the spur-of-the-moment in 
face-to-face meetings.  Right now, if you think a WG or BOF has a really 
Bad Idea or dangerous one, the most likely way to nip that in the bud is 
to show up at the meeting in person, be really critical, and get the 
more prominent voices in the room on your side.  (And sometimes, I 
suspect IESG wants it that way, because then they don't have to be the 
ones to wield the axe.)

Is that really the best way to deal even with Bad Ideas?

Or for that matter, we tend to evaluate WG proposals separately, rather 
than realizing that IETF has limited resources and picking a set of new 
proposals from a slate with those resource limitations in mind.   As a 
result we have too many WGs that produce too many RFCs of limited 
applicability and/or marginal quality, and we pat ourselves on the back 
because our output has increased.   How effective would, say, a funding 
agency be if it didn't try to keep from spreading its resources too thinly?

In general, I think we'll get more benefit from analyzing which of our 
practices impair our ability to provide value for the Internet, than 
from arguing about which groups of people have which character flaws.

Keith