Hello everybody,
As I have little more time now, so I want to express my opinion regarding
asrg live session on IETF meeting. I think it went badly and choice for
presentations were not appropriate for the IETF conference.
First part, were presentations on how bad spam is, what users should do,
legal, etc. These are information to people who do not know about the problem
and people at ietf are quite aware of the problem. Now these kind of
presentations might have been ok if there were scientific in its
nature or presentation, i.e. result of research efforts, like ARTG
is supposed to actually do, but these were just views of particular
organizations. But even that would have been ok if not for that
fact, that these presentations took majority of time and being controversial
to some, resulted in lots of discussions. And regarding these discussions,
these were to a degree what we on the list call "noise". Now this noise
is exactly the reason why some people who are experts in email have left
this email list and do not participate any more, some of them were
present at the meeting and I think they saw the same on the life meeting
and this only made matters worse if we want to get any kind of support
from IETF in general and IESG for whatever solutions we can think are
appropriate to stop/reduce/control spam.
Second part of the meeting was supposed to be little more technical (half
of the room was emtpy by the time it started...) but unfortunetly there
was really not enough time for it and it was completely dominated by
vendors trying to push their own solutions and all solutions were very
commercial in nature. None was big help at this point and none (except
verisign, though presentation was still one-sided towards S/MIME) tried to
see what else similar is available that may not be commercial and may do
the same. Also it can be noted that AT&T presented technology on which
they have some patents and IETF has very clear guidelines that this is
dscoraged to say the least and group chairs should when two solutions
exist (one patented, one not) always choose non-patented solution, same
applies for presentations, this should have been screened and patent-related
presentation made available if nothing else similar exist.
Also have to be noted that most presentations on the live meeting were by
persons who did not try to participate at the mailing list and are completely
unknown to us and this is also against general policies for IETF and IRTF
as first what are supposed to be presented are work done as part of mailing
list efforts (i.e. general work area) usually by people who are most active
on the list and only afterwards at the very end are there allowed presentations
by other organizations with similar interest or work area (and those
presentations should be carefully chose to minimize commercial views).
In short, like I said in previous email - the presentations were all
opinions of particular organizations and all commercial (even spamcon is
really what I call "commercial" non-profit foundation, as apposed to say
CAUSE) and were not individual submission as is supposed to be done at
IETF and IRTF. As a result engineers who were attending IETF probably
got negative view of our group and our efforts. The only thing I can think
of why chair did something like that would have been to get media exposure,
I'm sure media not be research or engineering centric would not see
serious downsides that I have noticed. Now I'n not against additional
media exposure, but I do not believe we're at the point where this is
really needed, what we need are people serious about working on technical
solutions and media will provide information about our group to general
user audience that would only bring more noise.
In the future meetings done in connection with IETF (are we meeting in
Vienna?) if we're going to have so many non-technical discussions, I
would strongly recommend separting into two sessions, one for this
general/media-centric and one for actual engineers to work on technical
issues that we may have.
I do hope chair takes my comments seriously!
He really did a bad job today chosing what is to be presented (i'm sure he
had multiple options), keeping discussions short (so that there was time
for additional presentations) or in general being prepared for this life
meeting (remember agenda is supposed to be reviewed by mail list and be
announced well before the actual meeting, that is just one example).
--
William Leibzon
Elan Communications Inc.
william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net
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