Following up on some of the Plenary discussion:
1) 'Newbies' and 'Clueless people'
There are some folk who come to the list with proposals that are
clearly deranged. The guy proposing that TCP/IP should switch from
using square packets to round ones for instance.
That said, if there is one thing that is likely to set me off it is
when I see someone make a perfectly sensible proposal on the list and
gets back a response of the form 'This is insane and if you understood
anything about the subject area you would know why'.
When I see people trying to pull rank to squish ideas, I think it is
incumbent on the rest of us to respond.
2) 'Already agreed'
I have great difficulty in determining what is 'already agreed' in an
organization that has no democratic decision making process. The IESG
can make decisions for the IESG but those are not necessarily
decisions of the IETF. We don't have an architecture board any more
since the legendary Kobe event.
But another problem with 'already agreed' is that most often the
people prating some dogma don't realize that (1) they are repeating a
slogan summarizing what was a subtle, highly nuanced argument and (2)
the Internet of 2 billion users is very different to the Internet of
the 1970s when some of these slogans were coined.
Take being permissive in what you accept. We built HTML on that
principle. It was a mistake. The problem is that people don't write
HTML to the spec, they suck-it-and-see. And most times they only try
one browser. So the behavior of browsers has become bizarrely
non-deterministic.
Recourse to the End-To-End protocol is also common. But rarely do I
hear people use it to say 'we should stop allowing SMTP mail servers
damaging messages by wrapping lines to fit messages into a VT100
terminal' which is the type of argument that it applies to. Instead it
is used as an all purpose cudgel to beat up opponents by reference to
irrelevant authority.
Modern IP networks actually do a lot of work at places other than the
endpoints and there are sound architectural arguments for doing so. I
have over a hundred IP enabled devices in my house. Some of those are
things like light switches, coffee machines, daleks, laundry, etc. I
don't want to have to install anti-virus on an arduino. Having worked
in industrial control, I want to be able to find out the purpose of
every packet on my network. And that means having a front door and
only letting in packets that I think I want.
3) Never the right time
One of the process abuses that annoys me the most is when people find
that there is never a right time to raise their objection. During
charter formation they will be told that the focus must be highly
restricted to get anywhere. During the Working Group they are told it
is not in the charter. Then decisions get made that pre-empt their
proposal completely and they are told that it is too late THEY SHOULD
HAVE RAISED THEM EARLIER.
This has happened to me more than once and it is the reason that there
are some people I won't work with because that type of behavior has
consequences as far as I am concerned.
If the IESG does not want to have that sort of unpleasantness appear
on IETF list then they need to be more pro-active in making sure the
problem doesn't arise.
These days when someone tries to tell me 'you can't raise that now' I
ask when I can raise it and try to get a statement to that effect from
an AD.