Re: discussion style and respect

[Michael StJohns <[e-mail]>]

At 07:10 AM 6/12/2015, Jari Arkko wrote:
>Let me just say that ‘standards by combat’ has not been my experience :-)
>nor should it be our mode of operation.

Hi Jari - 

I'm violating my own "no bumper stickers" rule I'm afraid with the "standards by combat" tag.  :-) Look for  T-Shirts soon!

 But in any number of groups over time I've seen exactly this behavior.  Still seeing this.  And it doesn't have to be shouting, or loud arguments in front of the mike, sometimes it's as simple as having a clique that wants one thing and presenting good technical arguments against fall in the face of the crowd of supporters for that one thing.  An overwhelming numerical advantage and "standards by combat" suggests that your opponent will cede the field.  Of course, there are our Don Quixote's and they will continue to tilt at windmills even when common sense would suggest they won't win.




>Mike is completely right about 'strongly presented, vigorously defended,
>by people with gravitas applicable to the technology’. And about our
>consensus mode of operation. These are how we should be.
>
>But it does not follow that aggressive argumentation or a war of ideas
>is what we should be doing. Granted, there are always some people in any
>organisation who want that sort of thing… egos… techies… need to
>show superiority… cases of busy or poor management… social skills…
>online discussion forums… people who thrive on creating controversy.

Blaming on the people is one approach - but ....


There's an old children's instructional tale about cutting a cake in a manner to prevent argument:

One child cuts the cake, the other selects the piece.

This is an example of a system that works in spite of  (or maybe because of) the selfishness of the participants.

My - let's not call it a theory, but an emerging hypothesis - is that the consensus process tends to incentivize confrontational approaches, especially when the difference between winning and losing may have real world implications for the participants in the form of compensation, recognition, product acceptance etc.   

The WG chairs can mitigate this somewhat, but in some cases the chairs are as much the problem as anything else in that their biases and goals favor one "side" or another.  It's hard to have a WG chair who is completely impartial,  but I don't know that that's a goal we should be pursuing.

My fondest desire would be to have a system that works in spite of (or because of) human nature regardless of the participant set and mostly gets the "right" answer for some definition of right.  I'm not opposed in principle to the current process, except that I think more "wrong" decisions are tending to creep in and I think it's related to the consensus process in some form.

I have no objective measures for "right", "wrong" and their relationship to the current process.  Unfortunately, neither does the IETF as a whole.  The paragraph immediately above is at best a feeling and at worst a premonition....


[Side note here - sorry:  A lot of this discussion has been of the form "what's good for our participants", when I think it needs to at least as much about "what's good for the IETF production of good technical standards".  The former is important, but more important - to me at least - are quality standards.   If we can do the latter while considering the former, I'm all for it, but if we do the former and ignore the latter, I think we're doing ourselves a big disservice.]


Mike