Re: IESG Statement On Oppressive or Exclusionary Language

[Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]>]

Thanks, S. Inline

On Sun, Aug 09, 2020 at 03:03:02PM -0700, S Moonesamy wrote:
> Hi Toerless,
> At 10:13 AM 09-08-2020, Toerless Eckert wrote:
> > Who is "your" ? Anybody who learned (american ?) english before the age of 6 ?
> > 
> > Btw.: I disagree. Any choices beyond ubiquitously recognized reasonably
> > good american english is probably an IETF community choice, and not
> > one of a subset defined by upbringing.
> 
> Here are two sentences from a RFC:
> 
>   "For example, a poor person in a Third World country might keep the money
>   in each mail message, regardless of whether it is spam".
> 
>   "Assuming cheap labor in a poor country can be obtained for about
>    60 cents per hour, and assuming a Turing test of a 30-second duration,
>    this is about 0.50 cents per test and thus 0.50 cents per message to
>    send an IM spam."
> 
> The sentence is proper US English as it went through the publication
> process.  Anyone discussing those sentences at that point in time would be
> rebuked.  I took a look at the last-call mailing list.  There isn't much
> activity there except for the sponsored reviews.  I doubt that anyone would
> flag those sentences.

I was primarily thinking about the the fact that the whole community should
be able to claim to have a say in the policies, eve if they are non-native
english speaker.

I fully agree that the execution of the policies through just current
feedback to last-call mailing list would just result in randomn subsets of
the community getting involved, and primarily native english speakers.

Hence i think the policy should be to
ensure that there is a neutral, community selected set of language experts
that executive the community desired policy. I was recommending a nomcom
style election process for them as one possible way to achieve this. I
could perfectly think of pairs of native english speakers in the community
that would cancel each others extreme views of lanugage out, thinking it
could result in good compromise language....

> > In reality, i think the policies and how to interpret them will simply be
> >  made by a combination of IETF leadership the minority that is able to
> > most cohesively voice their opinion. Aka: the usual IETF min/max way:
> > minimum effort by the people with privilege vs. maximum effort by
> > others to overturn those decisions.
> 
> I see it a bit differently.  Sometimes, an opinion which might look
> convincing at first glance does not carry much weight if you (used in
> general terms) look at the facts.  The policies are usually based on input
> from less than 1% of the "community".  The breadth, in terms of
> participation, is quite narrow.

IMHO not much different from what i was saying. I just took the means of
gaming the process also into account. Aka: selective aggregation of
received opinions from the list, moving decisions to different forums than
email where the weight of pro/con would be known different, etc. pp.

Cheers
    Toerless

> Regards,
> S. Moonesamy