Re: on "positive" organizational culture

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

>> I would state your sentence differently - the behavior of those who control an organization, in the long term, approaches the worst behavior that the community is willing to tolerate.
> I don’t agree that is inevitable. There are plenty of people out there, both in leadership positions and not, who have a strong moral compass or some other strong personal limiter and so will not bend.  That is not to say that I think safeguards should not be in place to prevent this - they should.
(Again, I'm not talking about any specific persons here.)

Even people with strong moral compasses will occasionally "bend".   
Those with weaker moral compasses will "bend" more often.   Some people 
will not even see the same decisions as having a moral or ethical 
consideration.

People with more political skill may be able to negotiate better 
compromises than those with less skill.   If those with such skill are 
also wise and well-intended, that's great.   But sometimes politically 
skilled and/or well-intended people make unfortunate decisions, as we 
all do.

Individuals also have personal biases which may affect their decision 
making, in ways that are not well-aligned with IETF's goals.  Sincere 
and thoughtful opinions can differ about that alignment.

All of these factors are always present to varying degrees. Over time,  
the mistakes tend to accumulate, as unfortunate decisions made in the 
past become used as justifications to demand additional unfortunate 
decisions.   It is _very_ difficult for even the best-intentioned, 
wisest, and most politically skilled persons to buck that trend.

It would be extremely unwise for IETF to adopt an organizational culture 
that presumes we can always have leaders with strong moral compasses, 
considerable political skill, wisdom, good intentions, and no harmful 
biases.   We have generally been fortunate, I believe, in often having 
very good leaders.   But we should know better than to presume we will 
always be so fortunate.

That's why IETF's organizational culture needs to be one that is both 
crafted and maintained by the whole community, not dictated by its 
leaders.   And that's just one reason why IETF's expectations for 
behavior between contributors (and leaders are also contributors) need 
to favor openness and transparency.


But back to a statement you made in a note to Randy Bush:

> There is a big difference between people asking questions, making 
> recommendations, providing alternative analysis, challenging 
> decisions, etc and impugning motives, deliberately misrepresenting 
> people/processes, plain insults, etc. The former is perfectly 
> acceptable, the latter is never acceptable.

I am largely in agreement with this statement (and have used similar 
words myself).   I certainly don't find personal insults acceptable.   
When someone misrepresents a person or a process, my general assumption 
is that it's more likely to be a misunderstanding than deliberate.  (But 
deliberate misrepresentations do sometimes occur. )

I also agree that it's not appropriate to impugn others' motives - at 
least not without citing supporting evidence and even then it should be 
done only as a last resort.    But we should not be so naive as to 
assume that people never have inappropriate motives. The problems I have 
with such accusations are: (a) it's very easy to misunderstand someone 
else's motive and for the accusation to simply be wrong; and (b) 
discussions about motive almost always serve as distractions from 
development of better technical solutions.   So at least in most IETF 
contexts, it seems better to try to keep the discussion in the technical 
realm.   For instance, if a proposal is motivated by a desire to use the 
standards process to gain an unfair technical advantage over 
competitors, it almost always will do some harm to Internet users - and 
that harm may be easier to demonstrate than the motive.

But sometimes inappropriate motive does rear its ugly head.   IMO 
current IETF processes are not well-designed to deal with these cases, 
but I'm not sure what remedy to recommend.


Where you and I might disagree is in use of the word "positive" to 
describe the culture that is needed.   For IETF to function well, it is 
essential to have technical disagreements and criticism of technical 
proposals.   These disagreements and criticism are often unpleasant, 
because the process of examining potential flaws in one's own proposals 
is itself unpleasant.   The process is unpleasant even if everyone is 
being respectful, so it's not a surprise if discussions sometimes get 
heated.   But it's only by exposing such flaws that we can fix them, or 
discard proposals that can't be fixed.   And many people understand that 
it's more important to ultimately get good results than to have their 
own proposals win.   It's even possible to be happy that someone else 
has found a better way, and good engineers know that.

I've also seen cases (both inside and outside of IETF) in which a demand 
for positivity has been deliberately used to suppress input that those 
in leadership positions didn't want to have aired.

Bottom line: I believe that for IETF to be able to do its job well, 
transparency must be more important than a vague notion of positivity.   
Or, to put it differently, I prefer to emphasize a different kind of 
positivity:  I believe we as a community should commit ourselves to 
producing solutions of benefit for a broad spectrum of Internet users, 
and our norms of interacting among ourselves should be defined in 
furtherance of that purpose.

Keith