Re: discussion style and respect

[Melinda Shore <[e-mail]>]

On 6/13/15 12:22 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> On 14/06/2015 01:19, John C Klensin wrote:
>> ...   However, if a WG is
>> started with a "solution" and a group of people behind it, there
>> are some bad effects:
> Yes, and this is certainly a very real situation. I've personally
> experienced it in the past, and am currently experiencing it
> (without belligerence, fortunately).

I'm actually pretty ambivalent about this one.  I'd much
rather see things coming in that are relatively well-baked
than see proposals that are just problem descriptions.
It seems to me to be a more productive use of energy to
negotiate engineering differences than it is go try to
figure out whether or not a given problem statement reflects
an actual problem that somebody is really experiencing, or
if there's the ability to come up with a useful solution.
Yes, it can be heated and horrible (and I actually left the
IETF for several years in part because of my experience
along these lines in one particular working group), but
I think we're better off figuring out how to deal with
these situations than we are going with the problem statement/
use case/gap analysis model, which is really beginning to
annoy me as unproductive, slow, and unmoored to much that's
useful.

Melinda