Re: On diversity in the NomCom

[Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]>]

Hi Rich,

I hope you enjoy a bit of what i intend to be good humored ranting:

Where you at the infamous RFC bof where 20 people presented and
discussed 30 opinions about what should be in what (RFC variation)
name, without ever explaining their context upfront, leaving many
 observers in the dark as to what the heck anyone was talking about ?

If we ever where to poll for most bizarre IETF meeting, than that
RFC bof would get my vote. Really entertaining. As confusing as
westworld season 1+2.

If anybody wants to open the pandoras box of trying to make
RFC be anything but just the superset of all the documents
we publish, then i will chime in on the side of constitutional
originalists meaning an RFC is a document that is asking
for feedback. Nothing less, nothing more. The whole abuse
of putting never-to-be-touched normative specifications into RFC
is an abomination of what used to be an ad-hoc engineering 
discussion tool. Only "drafts" today are really in the spirit
and name of RFCs IMHO.

Maybe less of a rant:

The mayority of customers also are NOT clear about the distinction
between the different tracks and status options of RFCs we have, and
even when they are aware, it does not matter that much, because
the predominant use of RFCs in customers is to put their numbers
into RFP for product offers. And when a customer wants specific
functionality it is secondary whether this is an individual
submission, informational, experimental or standards track
RFC. Only customers who actaully follow IETF would know the
difference in "quality" of the specs based on status status.

Cheers
    Toerless

On Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 03:04:34PM +0000, Salz, Rich wrote:
> > I also note that many other SDOs publish informative,
> non-standard, documents in the form of technical reports and
> that things we would call Experimental (or our original
> definition of Proposed Standard) show up as things "for trial
> use".  So, again, fwiw, we are not the only, or even the first,
> body to conclude that formal review, consensus, and publication
> of such documents is a practical necessity.
> 
> If we were to do this, we need another term besides RFC.  After 20 years, everyone "knows" that RFC means an Internet standard.
> 
> (Yes, I exaggerate about what everyone knows)
> 

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