--On Saturday, April 19, 2014 08:17 -0700
ned+ietf(_at_)mauve(_dot_)mrochek(_dot_)com wrote:
I've been thinking about it, and I think this needs to be
addressed on at least
two different fronts. First, I've come to believe that the
IETF needs to say
something, in some capacity, about the political aspects of
the DMARC situation specifically.
I also think the time has come to try and address the more
general problem
of misunderstanding and/or misrepresentation of the status of
various
documents. This probably needs to be addressed through a
combination of
automatic labeling as well as some explicit statements here
and there.
Ned,
I agree, but I also think there is another element of the
situation that got us here, and that has led us close to other
problems in the past. When the RFC Editor is asked to publish a
non-WG document (i.e., either an individual submission through
the IETF stream or as an independent submission) that could be
construed as some sort of standard (whether actually standards
track or not) or approval of an IANA parameter registration is
on the basis of expert review, there as a potential for the
appearance of conflicts of interest. Those conflicts need not
be of the traditional legal or financial variety. They can
occur (or be perceived to occur) when someone's institutional or
organizational relationships outside the IETF might lead people
to suspect that review and decision-making might not be as
careful, unbiased, or primarily reflective of the interest of
the IETF or the broader Internet community as we would like it
to assume it always is. For situations where troublesome
relationships exist or might be inferred (even by those
suffering from mild paranoid), we need to get much more careful
about disclosure of the relationships involved.
And this really needs to be spearheaded by the IESG, not the
IAB. I hope the IESG is already considering taking action.
If not, they should be.
Indeed.
john