Re: discussion style and respect

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

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 3:42 PM, Hector Santos <[e-mail]> wrote:

> In my view, we have:
>
> o Too many projects done by the same few people, lost of synergism.
> o Too much fast tracking,
> o Too much informational or experimental status docs pushed as standards,
> o Too much lower quality of products,
> o Too much "big vs small" battles.
>

I think we have far too little thought given to the big picture. The WGs
that have got the green light of late all represent incremental improvement
on existing protocols with the WGs chartered to do as little original work
as possible.

That is OK if you think the Internet is basically OK and just needs the
most minor tweaks here and there. Which might be true in the lower levels
but it certainly isn't the case in security or applications.


Right now we are in something of a transition point between XML based web
services and JSON. It would be a really good thing if IETF could come up
with a single house style for JSON based Web services so that there was
some sort of consistency in approach like there is with SMTP/NNTP/HTTP.
Instead it looks like we will just muddle through.

I am also rather skeptical of this idea that IETF is well adapted to cross
WG and cross area collaboration. Right now I am trying to persuade people
that OpenPGP fingerprints are a good idea. In fact they are a good idea as
a basic security primitive that we apply in DNSSEC, S/MIME, SSH and pretty
much anywhere we might want to describe a root of trust in a compact
machine and human readable form.

To date, nobody has told me this is a bad idea or that it isn't worth
considering or harmful. Instead the pushback is 'convince me that this is
necessary'.

How are we going to get convergence between work in different groups if
that is the attitude?