Re: United Nations report on Internet standards

[Vittorio Bertola <[e-mail]>]

>     Il 16/03/2020 16:35 Eliot Lear <lear=[e-mail]> ha scritto:
> 
>     Individuals from governments, industry policy makers, and civil society experts are welcome to participate in all IETF community activities, at draft conception, working group formation or assignment, working group adoption, working group development, IETF last call, and then errata/updates to that work.  All that is required is an email account.
> 
Ok, I'm just relaying the message: participating in IETF activities as a non-engineer, just to notice and raise a hand when something will have non-technical impact (it's unclear how, since non-engineers would hardly understand the content of the messages), is seen as an almost impossible proposition - basically, as an euphemism for "the IETF is not interested in what anyone else thinks". And actually it is hard to participate even for engineers, unless they spend several years in a learning curve.

So in other circles there is the desire that the engineers, once having worked out their ideas, reach out to the rest of the Internet community, explain things in layman's terms, ask for comments and adjust the plans, to make sure that the result is fine with everyone, which in turn will make successful adoption more likely.

Also, this is not just about stakeholder groups (i.e. governments), but about the type of people that are involved. The suggestion is that even companies that are already sending their engineers to the IETF should, at a specific stage and when standards have non-technical impacts, also send their policy and business people, in a context they would be comfortable in - which would also allow governments, NGOs and others to participate in the discussion. This would ensure that any non-technical contentious issues are addressed since the start, and that new standards already come out with a broadly agreed deployment plan, and willingness to deploy.

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Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
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