Re: A sad farewell

[Ralph Droms <[e-mail]>]

Henrik - Best wishes in your future endeavors.  Your many contributions will continue to be of critical benefit to the IETF and your ongoing participation will be missed.  I have always regarded you as a key leader and contributor to the IETF, who is a shining example of the volunteerism, consensus-based decision making and collegial behavior that have made the IETF successful.  Although we haven't chatted in a few years, I have very fond memories of our times together at IETF meetings and I will continue to wish you well in the future.

- Ralph


> On Nov 3, 2020, at 9:42 AM, Henrik Levkowetz <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Dear friends and acquaintances,
> 
> After 20 years of writing tools for the IETF, I will let my contract for
> tools maintenance lapse at the end of the year, and move on to other things.
> The reason is the attitude of the current IETF Chair and LLC Board towards
> contractors in particular and IETF participants in general.  Care for the
> community doesn't seem to matter to them.
> 
> The current Chair and LLC Board seems to see contractors, including the
> secretariat and myself, not as members of the community, but simply someone
> who should do what they are told by the authority in charge.  This in total
> contrast with the approach of Russ Housley as IETF Chair; he explicitly
> tried to make the secretariat and other contractors an integral part of the
> community, inviting them in, rather than pushing them out.
> 
> Remembering how supportive the previous full Exec Dir, Ray Pelletier had
> been with respect to the tools work, I was hoping that things would change
> at the end of last year with Jay Daley; unfortunately it hasn't; rather the
> opposite, and it has simply become too painful to carry on.
> 
> Things got bad at the end of last year, when the LLC Board went back on their
> word after accepting my bid on the RFP in full without reservations; they
> simply changed the contract offered without one word of conversation about
> the changes.  My bid would have been substantially different for an RFP with
> the conditions in that contract.  That was tough, but the final straw came at
> the beginning of 2020, when a Tools Architecture and Strategy Team was
> established to look at the tools future, and I was excluded from it.  Being
> considered a replaceable cog and not a part of the community is not a fun
> environment in which to work, and I've been depressed for most of the year
> following that.
> 
> The consequence is, as indicated above, that I  will not sign on to any
> contract renewal or bid on any new RFP when the current term runs out for
> the tools maintenance contract at the end of the year.
> 
> Many and big thanks are due to all the IETF chairs who have supported and
> encouraged my tools work: Harald Alvestrand, Brian Carpenter, Russ Housley,
> and Jari Arkko.  Huge appreciation and gratitude also goes to Robert Sparks
> and Russ Housley for the privilege of working with them in the Tools Team
> and the TMC (Tools Management Committee).  And finally, thanks to all the
> members of the community who over the years have made it a joy to do tools
> work, by expressing their appreciation of the tools.
> 
> ----------
> 
> The longer story, for background, to explain how I came to feel so strongly
> about being excluded from tools architecture work and having the LLC Board
> go back on their word without even thinking it was worth talking to me about
> it:
> 
> I wrote my first draft of a draft in 1999; my first meeting was IETF 49.
> 
> In 2001, Sami Vaarala and I both presented drafts outlining NAT traversal
> for Mobile IP, and based on the way we worked to merge these and build
> consensus, I became co-chair of MIP4, a position I held till the group was
> closed in 2015 (although there was essentially no activity during the last
> 5 years).
> 
> I early thought it absolutely silly that in the internet age, IETF documents
> were not available as HTML documents with internal and external links.  That
> led to rfcmarkup (2002), which was deployed to provide htmlized versions of
> RFCs, and later drafts, first on my own domain, and later on tools.ietf.org.
> 
> As I was writing drafts, I was annoyed with having to manually check the format
> requirements (line length, boilerplate, and whatnot), and adapted an awk
> snipped as a 10-line script to check line length for me (2003).  That grew,
> and became 'idnits'.
> 
> Having to read new revisions of drafts, to keep up with other Mobile IP
> contributions, I found it annoying not to know where the changes in the new
> rev were, and how much was changed.  This led to 'rfcdiff' (2003).
> 
> As WG co-chairs, we had to put together a summary of the status of the various
> documents before each meeting -- that status report was the main way to let
> participants know about draft progress, since there was no datatracker in
> 2000, and no WG support in the IESG tracker tool when it appeared.  Doing the
> summary each meeting was very much drudge work, and becoming tired of repeating
> the exercise each meeting, I created a document status page for MIP4, updated
> automatically from various text files available from the draft repository and
> the IESG tracker (around 2004).  Other chairs saw this, and asked me to do the
> same for them, and it grew from there, and was eventually incorporated into the
> official datatracker as WG pages.
> 
> Around late 2006/early 2007, serious SQL injection vulnerabilities were
> discovered in the datatracker as it was then.  After a lot of feet-dragging
> by the vendor in addressing the vulnerabilities, Bill Fenner and I started
> a skunk-works project to completely rewrite the publicly accessible datatracker
> from old-style Perl to Python and Django.  For 2 months we worked up to 10
> hours per day, and disclosed the effort only when we had enough in place to
> show that the effort was viable.  The powers that were applauded the effort,
> and we carried through, and released the rewrite in June 2007.
> 
> I continued to do tools work during 40%-50% of my time up till 2016, at no
> cost to the IETF -- all work and tools were donated by myself or my employer
> over the years.  In 2016 I was about to switch employers, and the IETF
> Chair and several previous chairs saw the opportunity to get me to work full
> time on IETF tools, which I happily did until the current chair started to
> seriously treat me not as a member of the community but as a contractor that
> needed to be told just what to do in early 2018.  After that, things went
> downhill.
> 
> As mentioned earlier, the final straw came early this year, when Alissa and
> Jay decided to set up a Tools Architecture and Strategy Team, and excluded
> me from that work.  That was to me such a clear and unequivocal statement
> of me not being considered part of the community that it drove me into a
> depression, from which I could only partially recover by distancing myself
> from the tools effort more and more.  The depression has gone in waves in
> the following months, often triggered by additional actions and statements
> showing the same attitude.
> 
> I don't know which attitude the next Chair will have, but even if it's more
> in line with earlier chairs, the LLC Board and Jay, who have been part of
> making this year a miserable one for me, will still be there, not much changed.
> 
> So it's not with joy I move on and look for other things to occupy me; it's
> with sadness in abandoning an area in which I've invested a lot of myself
> over the last 20 years.
> 
> My best wishes to you all going forward.
> 
> 
> 	Henrik
> 
> 
> 
>