Re: [Internetgovtech] Involvement from other constituencies

[Andrea Glorioso <[e-mail]>]

On Saturday, March 1, 2014, Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 01, 2014 at 09:27:13AM -0500, John Curran wrote:
>
> > We have to face the fact that the remarkable success of the Internet
> means
> > that it very difficult for a given government or community to _not_ use
> IETF
> > protocols and still achieve global interoperability.
>
> That's not merely a "fact", it's a tautology.  If you want global
> interoperability ("with the Internet" is implied in your original),
> then you have to use Internet protocols.
>
> > This in turn only reinforces the need for protocol development
> > processes which are open to all interested parties, and transparency
> > in decision making.
>
> I agree, but I think it's important to recognise that many of the
> people who appear to want the pony named "using the Internet without
> using IETF protocols" actually don't want a process that is open to
> all interested, or transparency in decision making.  Many of them
> instead wish the decisions to be taken by treaty bodies in closed
> rooms.  I think it is not surprising that people are suspicious of
> importing "political considerations" into the protocol-making
> discussion, because that looks like a Trojan horse for "takeover by
> treaty organizations".


On the other hand, by being overly suspicious to people / organizations
which are simply tying to make sure the range of "operational
considerations" (as you very well put it in your message) is broad enough
to avoid problems down the road, the risk is actually empowering those
parties which are actually hiding in the Trojan horse.

I don't have a problem with mistrust - a certain degree of it is
unavoidable and might even be beneficial, if it forces everyone to speak
their mind clearly in order to overcome it - but there are moments in which
mistrust can become paralyzing. (I'm not talking specifically about you)


> > When we need to consider factors other than purely technical merit, it
> may
> > result in social, political, or economic tradeoffs being integrated into
> the
> > protocols,
>
> I strongly disagree with this approach to describing the question.  If
> we need to include certain social, political, or economic tradeoffs,
> then those are part of the use cases that the protocol is supposed to
> be addressing.  Therefore, this is not some case of considering
> factors other than purely technical merit: there's no such thing as
> "pure technical merit" without the operational conditions expected of
> the protocol.  This is engineering we're supposed to be doing, not
> mathematics.


As I said - this is very well put.

What we sometimes have to confront, however, is indeed the question of
> whether this or that tradeoff ought to be on the list.  That is, to my
> way of thinking, the difficulty we're having, but it's not different
> in kind to the problem developers have always had in understanding
> what the product and sales people want.  Getting the requirements
> right is hard, and it gets harder the further one gets from being the
> end user.  In the early period of the Internet, approximately all the
> users _were_ the developers, so figuring out the requirements was
> probably easier in that you could talk to people and find out their
> problems.  It gets harder the less representative of actual users our
> population gets.
>

So would you agree that in order to make sure all the requirements are
factored in, we need to make sure the number, but especially the range
of expertise, sensitivities etc of those who participate in the definition
of requirements should be enlarged? Please correct me if I misunderstood
your thinking.

Best,

Andrea


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