Re: [Last-Call] OT: change BCP 83 [Re: Last Call: BCP 83 PR-Action Against Dan Harkins]

[Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Oct 04, 2022 at 09:00:26AM +1300, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> > - There are references made to unreasonable behavior in private conversation, which we can not vet,
> That's true, and technically irrelevant anyway since the topic is inappropriate postings on specific lists.
> >    and drafts that have been completely removed, so we can not vet those either (now).
> 
> Consider yourself fortunate. Those of us who read them at the time were mainly glad to see them removed. But a point that I haven't seen made on list is that even if we construe those drafts as satire in the spirit of (e.g.) Jonathan Swift, such satire is mainly recognizable to people of English mother tongue and with a broad general education. They would appear simply offensive to IETF participants who know English mainly as a language for technical, engineering and scientific work. So whatever the intention of those drafts, they definitely had a negative impact on our community as a whole.

After a friendly person gave me access to the drafts and i first understood
how they relate to the PR at all, that input just reconfirms to me that the BCP 83 public
feedback step is not very useful unless you are privileged to a lot more in-the-know and
have some reason to spend a lot more time on it than most of us would or should. 

> If you think the BCP83 process has that defect, see the above Subject header.

A key defect is exactly that it encourages to utter opinions with too little detail
of the situation.  It may be useful to ask the community to provide additional evidence for or
against the case, but without having a real detailled rundown of the evidence and how the
people responsible for judging are evaluating it, i don't think we should let the public
chime in with judging opinions. This judging is just exactly incurring all the problems we did
try to avoid with the NomCom process. Of course, BCP 83 does not exactly detail 
"discussion by the community", but the practice we see here on the list is exactly that
of judgments.

> As far as I can tell, the IESG has followed the current process correctly.

Sure, but BCP 83 is too unspecific as to how detailled the rundown of the evidence and
decision making process has to be, and whether or not or how judgements by the community
should be taken into account, etc. pp. 

> > IMHO all that makes those process steps overall more hurtfull to the reputation of the IETF than helpfull,
> 
> I don't agree. I think it's better to have the debate on the record than behind closed doors.

Unless someone files a BCP 83 notion against us (community), we would be having a
public debate about the issue whatever BCP 83 says, and that is fine. The debate
does not have to be part of BCP 83, and uneducated input shouldn't be counted for
judgements in a BCP 83 case. 

Cheers
    Toerless

> Regards,
>    Brian

-- 
---
[e-mail]