Re: A sad farewell

Alia Atlas <akatlas@gmail.com> Thu, 05 November 2020 00:17 UTC

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References: <71444008-c716-d83f-a2e2-6e4c7e3fd58a@levkowetz.com> <5360E06F-5639-43D6-8A7E-FA141989A884@gmail.com> <20201103200745.GA12654@faui48f.informatik.uni-erlangen.de> <b0ca070f-dd1f-1b8d-940c-7e4c57ea8393@cisco.com>
In-Reply-To: <b0ca070f-dd1f-1b8d-940c-7e4c57ea8393@cisco.com>
From: Alia Atlas <akatlas@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 04 Nov 2020 19:17:20 -0500
Message-ID: <CAG4d1rczMJA3jyqqV3EakRcF_sX=sQEyGBZ69At3SL+uFCVoXQ@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: A sad farewell
To: Benoit Claise <bclaise=40cisco.com@dmarc.ietf.org>
Cc: Toerless Eckert <tte@cs.fau.de>, Henrik Levkowetz <henrik@levkowetz.com>, IETF Discussion <ietf@ietf.org>
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Henrik,

Benoit has put into words better than I could my feelings.  I am very sad
to see your email
and deeply appreciate all your contributions over an extended time to the
IETF as part of
the community.  I greatly enjoyed and appreciated the chances I had to
collaborate with you.

Regards,
Alia

On Wed, Nov 4, 2020 at 3:33 PM Benoit Claise <bclaise=
40cisco.com@dmarc.ietf.org> wrote:

> Henrik, all,
>
> I see a lot of well-deserved "thank you" emails. I could add to those
> ... even if I did thank you many times verbally in the past.
>
> However, I'm with Toerless here: frustrated
> How does a community-centric organization such as the IETF arrive to a
> point of making its most passionate/dedicated people feel so excluded
> and frustrated that they leave the organization. The community and the
> current/future IESG must reflect on that ... if we want to the IETF to
> remain relevant.
>
> When I was in the IESG, I witnessed that the real guardians of the IETF
> process is actually the secretariat: they know what could (not) be done
> and gently corrected ADs' mistakes. Similarly, the real guardians of the
> tools are Henrik & company.
> The secretariat and tools team might be contractors, but first of all,
> they're members of the community. And they should be considered as such!
> Remove the secretariat & the tools team and the IETF will simply stop
> working.
>
> I'm thankful for Henrik's dedication to this organization but at the
> same time sorry, sad, and frustrated.
>
> Regards, Benoit
>
> > I find the responses on this thread quite frustrating.
> >
> > They are exactly like what i have come to experience when people
> > have to leave big companies because of horribly bad management and
> > nobody sees a way to improve management. I would have hoped
> > that IETF culture and community influence was better and that
> > something like this should not have happened or could even be
> > reversed by community outcry and forcing change in leadership
> > behavior.
> >
> > I am sorry to hear the insight about LLC operations, because to me
> > the contributor facing view i had was very positive. But either i am
> > not on the right mailing lists, or these internal conflicts are
> > not exposed at all for the community to be able to influence them.
> >
> > In any case, i fear that progress of tooling, especially in these
> > critical times of migration to XMLv3 starting to expose limitations
> > and IMHO a need for ongoing "free-of-process" improvement of tooling.
> >
> > To me, IETF is best when it is driven by engagement of contributors,
> > and (rough) community consensus, and not by leadership decisions.
> > Unfortunately, i think we are shifting more and more to this leadership
> > preference based constrainment of innitiatives, innovation and
> activities,
> > spending more time on prohibiting activities than encouraging them.
> > This is IMHO, what is going to kill IETF if it continues.
> >
> > To me, the tooling team was predominantly visible through the
> > extreme responsible hands-on work of Henrik, and i just considered
> > him to be the lead contributor to the "tools-track", so the fact
> > that he was because of reasons of contract and management decisions
> > kept out of the strategy is exactly the problem of self-righteous
> > managemenet centric companies. I guess we never had better oversight
> > of management tradition, because we came from a long time where we
> > may have just been very lucky in our choices of leadership. I don't know.
> >
> > *sigh*
> >
> > Cheers
> >      toerless
> >
> > On Tue, Nov 03, 2020 at 02:19:52PM -0500, Suresh Krishnan wrote:
> >> I am very sorry to hear that Henrik. Thanks for everything you have
> done for us over the years. The tools work you did made my IETF work as an
> author, chair, reviewer and AD much more pleasant and efficient. We will
> greatly miss you.
> >>
> >> Regards
> >> Suresh
> >>
> >>> On Nov 3, 2020, at 9:42 AM, Henrik Levkowetz <henrik@levkowetz.com>
> 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
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
>
>