Re: "community" for the RFC series

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Saturday, October 5, 2019 11:07 +1300 Brian E Carpenter
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> On the underlying point - the fuzziness of the community
> boundary - I really don't believe in magic, or that the
> community we should worry about is 7.7 billion people. But we
> would be deluding ourselves to think that we can count the
> members of the community; we can't even count the members of
> the IETF. So we really have to accept, IMHO, that there is an
> open-ended public service responsibility here, not just a
> responsibility to a well-defined closed community. And if an
> obscure network operator in Northern Elbonia has a comment to
> make on an RFC from 1969 tagged in the index as "(Status:
> UNKNOWN)", that is automatically part of the community
> discourse, even though we don't know which stream that RFC
> belongs to.

I think this is key although I look at it a bit differently.
Nothing I've said implied that we should be seeking consensus
of, much less speaking for, several billion people (nor trying
to enumerate them).   I don't think we should even be trying to
determine consensus among ISOC members or ISOC chapters even
though we presumably could get them enumerated if we asked
nicely.   At the same time, we know they are out there.  We can
identify many of the communities and at least crudely describe
their needs.  We should not presume we can identify all possible
communities or get the description of any one of them and their
needs exactly right.   We don't even make that presumption about
the community of active IETF participants and that is one reason
we talk only about "rough consensus" and not "strong consensus"
or "broad consensus".  To those communities who are part of the
global Internet community and whom we can identify, we owe a
real, good-faith, effort to try to make educated guesses at
their needs and to take what Brian calls an open-ended public
service responsibility and what I described earlier as acting as
trustees for that broader community.  We also have some
obligation to keep looking for and identifying those smaller
communities and clusters, rather than, in the extreme case,
either no one we cannot precisely identify or no one who is not
an active IETF participant, actually counts.

best,
   john