Re: Ostricising an individual -- Was Re: For Your Information

[Einar Stefferud <[e-mail]>]

I seems to me that we are in a very gray area, and on dubious ground
if we conspire to exclude someone.  Especially someone who is overtly
threatening and litigious, as our case demonstrates from the
transcript of the mailing list.  We should note that the mailing list
archives do provide a record which will document any bad behavior, his
and ours.

I liked Ed Levinson's idea of individual actions, but would suggest
even further that we not organize ourselves in any way to take any
specific actions.  I would leave it to individual choice as to whether
anyone wants to tell the list of a decision on individual
reading/responding policy, or on their own actions and policies.  I do
not intend to announce mine.

I can speak from very direct experience in this matter, having
recently been driven out of my own list which I set up to discuss
dialup-transport, under the aegis of IFIP-WG-6.5 of which I am Chair.

Some particular individual took exception to my stated goals for this
list which I established with the policy of focusing on
"pre-standards" development.  That is, the focus was not on "How do we
do it with the official standards", but "How would we do it, given
that the standards don't yet tell us how."  IFIP WG 6.5 did this kind
of pre-standards work on X.400, X.500, and the X.400/RFC822 Gateways
the became RFC987 and its successors.  WG 6.5 has an interesting
history of doing pre-standards stuff, and we are continuing to try.

The specific area of interest was Dialup-Transport, of the TP0/TP4
persuasion, such that we could enable dialup X.400 of the UUCP style.
The lack of this functionality in X.400 is a serious deficiency, and
much of the problem is in the lack of specification of it in the
standards.  X.400 purists don't like to do anything outside the
standards!

Unfortunately, one individual was determined to thwart any attempt to
seriously discuss any kind of pre-standards concepts, or anything
outside the standards, and he wrote incredibly long messages on lots
of off the mark topics.  This we could have tolerated by ignoring his
messages, but this individual would also not let me say anything in
the list without torching me, and he destroyed my ability to function
in the project I was trying to lead.  He essentially mounted a denial
of service attack, and deprived me of access to my own list.

The only solution I was left with was to simply take down the list,
which I did, just as unilaterally as I put it up.  It was a very a
bitter experience!

Now, we cannot allow this to happen in the ietf list, but we also
cannot take conspiratorial actions to deny participation to anyone
without some kind of clear cause.  And we cannot just take it down!

Perhaps we should invite the EFF to consider the issues and give us
some words of wisdom.

In the meantime, we should each individually decide how we are going
to deal with the situation we have been presented with, and then act
accordingly, in our own individual self interests.

Cheers...\Stef