Re: [Pesci-discuss] Finding and nurturing the bright sparks of genius

At 13:09 26/10/2005, Elwyn Davies wrote:
>The best work in the IETF (IMH and personal O) comes from 
>recognition of a problem blended with the kernel of an idea for a solution.
>Within those solutions, progress is made by individuals or small 
>design teams coming up with ideas that advance the work.
>
>The original ideas hardly ever stem from the larger consensus.  The 
>virtue of the wg and the larger IETF, at their best, is to recognize 
>the better mousetrap for what it is, to support it and  to converge round it.
>
>The IAB and the IESG are supposed to be architecturally, technically 
>and managerially aware of the problem space in which we are 
>working.  They need to make the IETF and the wider world aware of 
>this week's problems and promote the solutions we offer, but except 
>as individuals they are unlikely to come up with the sparks of 
>inventive genius that start us on the path to solutions.
>
>What they should be doing is looking in the right places for those 
>sparks of genius and then nuturing and fanning the flames into a 
>real better mousetrap solution which can achieve technical 
>excellence, market effectiveness and IETF consensus.  The IESG has 
>to *steer* these small sparks into enormous bonfires that will burn 
>up the problems (got a bit carried away with the metaphor there).
>
>[Aside: Maybe there is a principle in there that we didn't write down?]

Granularity, subsidiarity, "concertation" (French meaning and now 
Eurospeak: to independently act in a concerted way), multilateralism.
This is the essence of a distributed network. IETF is facing the 
necessary transition from a decentralised (still somewhat 
centralised) system to its natural distributed stability. This MUST 
go together with IAB thinking on the Internet architecture.

This architecture/meta-architecture is no small thing. It is what I 
call transitionning from "mono-Internet" to "multi-Internet".

>To my mind this applies just as much to our process as to the technical work.
>
>The discussion over the last couple of weeks has spent far too much 
>time worrying whether what PESCI is doing is subverting the IETF 
>aethos, rather than seeing it as a way to find out if there are any 
>sparks of genius out there to be nurtured.
>The discussion to date has neither spent a lot of time reviewing the 
>principles proposed (with one or two honorable exceptions) nor have 
>we seen any solutions proposed.

I proposed one: to apply to meta-architectural layer the RFC 1958 
architectural principle together with an IAB model of the network.

>If we agree that there is some sort of  problem, it seems to me that 
>almost any means is legitimate as a way to find the kernel of a 
>solution.  If the current draft does revisit the ground covered by 
>'problem' maybe it will trigger the Eureka moment in somebody for 
>some part of a perceived problem and they (and maybe some of their 
>colleagues) can come up with a strawman that we can discuss.  Until 
>we have a strawman, the discussion is likely to remain unfocussed 
>and procedural rather than solutional as it has done for the last 
>couple of years
>
>So: any or all of you, read what the draft says, please.

The first problem is to save a lof of time. When one quotes a Draft 
one does as for every other document: one gives its current URL.
Stupid input? I think it would save a lot of time and multiply 
reading by an order of magnitude ...

>  Then: do you believe there is a problem?  If so do you have a 
> bright idea? Then come and propose it.  Only then are we likely to 
> make progress and it will be up to the community and the IESG to 
> nurture and guide it (not necessarily work it).  Only if this 
> proposal is imposed without achieving community (rough) consensus 
> is the IETF ethos subverted.

All the best.
jfc

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