Re: Diversity and offensive terminology in RFCs

[Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[e-mail]>]

Just following up on Alissa's note ...

On Fri, Sep 21, 2018 at 8:21 AM Alissa Cooper <[e-mail]> wrote:

> I wanted to send a friendly reminder to keep discussions on this list
> professional, respectful, and courteous, per RFC 3005 and RFC 7154. The
> sergeants-at-arms are following up with individuals off-list as necessary.
>
> Niels, I think there might be two further contributions from you that
> could be helpful in this discussion. If you have links to relevant research
> in this area, those might be useful to share. I’m not saying that in the
> sense that you bear a burden of proof, but really just encouraging you and
> others to share research results that may be directly relevant if you’re
> aware of them.
>
> The other helpful item would be a clarification about what is being
> proposed. Are you interested in updating previously published RFCs, having
> authors use different terminology going forward, both, something else? Or
> were you just looking to spark discussion?
>

I suspect this helpful item is key to making progress with Alissa's first
helpful item.

What I was hoping for, when the thread started, is someone publishing a
list of "term X" that might be better rephrased as "term Y", with enough
discussion to help draft authors know whether replacing X with Y in a draft
was the right thing to do.

The discussion on the nuances of "MITM" in these threads has been a good
example of the kind of thing I'd want to know, if I wanted to make my draft
clearer, and I think "will this make our drafts clearer if we use this
terminology?" might be one good criteria for including "term X"s in the
list.

Other criteria could also be applied - I think Alissa's ask for pointers to
research is a step toward other criteria.

I've actually received an HRPC review for a draft I was working on (
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-iab-marnew-report/, in the IAB
stream), and found it useful,and made some changes based on the review, but
I wasn't thinking that anyone on the IAB was going to say "you have to make
all those changes to publish your draft in the IAB stream".

My third term on the IESG ends in March, but I'd be surprised if the
current IESG or any future IESG made a demand like that for drafts in the
IETF stream. We don't even do that with IETF review team reviews now - ADs
look at comments, not who made the comments, and work to ensure that the
right thing happens.

Do the right thing, of course.

Spencer