--On torsdag, januar 19, 2006 20:03:56 -0500 Sam Hartman
<hartmans-ietf(_at_)mit(_dot_)edu> wrote:
I'd first ask why repeated 30-day suspensions are ineffective. Harald
seems to be getting fairly efficient at suspending Jefsey on
ietf-languages. I believe he's been suspended on LTRU before. Is
Jefsey actually doing much damage there with all these suspensions?
At the moment, the pattern on ietf-languages is that:
- Jefsey posts one of his offtopic political harangues
- About five different people complain privately to me
- I suspend Jefsey's posting privilleges for a month
- About five people send thank-you notes, and wonder whether the IESG will
get off its butt and allow him to be suspended permanently, usually
accompanied with ruminations about whether it makes any sense to
participate in an organization that is so completely ineffective in
handling disruptive persons
- A month passes in which the list is relatively calm
- I remove Jefsey's suspension
- The pattern repeats
This is a waste of time, resources and the goodwill of the people who
contribute constructively.
Perhaps this is an appropriate measure to take when all of a person's
participation are destructive and they have nothing to offer.
That's not true for Jefsey. Jefsy has made significant positive
contributions to the IETF list. He has worked to describe the
perceptions that the IETF, IANA, ICAN, and related entities are
creating a US-centric Internet.
Permit me to disagree. And to rant for a little while (those who are tired
of the subject can hit "delete" now)....
The "contributions" that Jefsey has been making in this regard have, to me,
had a few common properties:
- The kernels of truth in his ramblings have been so blindingly obvious
that they are not news to anyone who's spent any significant time in the
political spaces tht he's talking about
- The biases, perceptions and sheer follies that he proclaims have been
sufficiently far off-mark that I as an European non-native English speaker
find it incredibly painful to even consider engaging in debates about
whether he has a point or not.
The result is not that more points get made, and wider perspectives are
had. The result is that *fewer* people contribute constructively to the
debate, and the IETF gets *less* information about the perceptions that the
rest of the world has on the matters about which Jefsey speaks.
For a recent example, see his "agreement" with me on the geopriv location
registry:
We fully agree on this. But I see you are fighting here the same
difficulty I fight against you for languages. They propose words in their
language context as you propose languages tags in your internationalised
context. They do the same layer violation as you do. The only solution to
this is to conceptualise and to universalise the concept. ISO 11179. You
define a concept, give it a unique ID (building a referent) and as many
names as you need which name the concept, not its version in a given
context. However I agree JTC1/SG32/W2 has not yet addressed the
multilingual and the networked aspects. But IETF have clumsily approached
it with IDNA and very well with the DNS.
There's a point here - that you need conceptual separation between "the
identity of the thing you name" and "the name that you give to the thing".
But many people who work with identifiers know that - Mike O'Dell pointed
me at Tom McArthur's "Worlds of reference" many years ago; recommended
reading!
But in order to consider that little gem of truth reasonably, I have to
wade through the swamp of parsing a message that claims:
- There isn't a common concept of "kitchen" between America and France (as
far as I know completely stupid)
- There are languages that use the same word for blue and green (as far as
I know false)
- That ISO 11179, a six-part, 200-page standard for "how to run a registry"
available in English only, is somehow going to make the IETF
internationalization efforts be much more conceptually correct
Rather than suffering through the aggravation of dealing with these
inanities, misrepresentations and out-and-out fantasies, I prefer to file
Jefsey's messages under my "don't look here" folder, and wait for someone
else to make the point.
The only argument I, personally, have in favour of replying to a Jefsey
message is that someone with less knowledge of the facts might be deluded
into thinking that he's speaking truth, that a sentence like
I do hope you will permit it to be in cooperation with the IGF,. That we
can proceed fast on a stable, reasonable and acceptable equal opportunity
but competitive fair basis. As we all agreed in Tunis.
actually means that the Tunis meetings (where ISOC did its usual yeoman's
job of trying to convey concerns between the "Internet people" and the
"Government people") actually came to a reasonable conclusion that
resembles something Jefsey's been arguing in favour of (I think that's TWO
unwarranted assumptions, btw).
I've come to the conclusion that my time is better spent on other things,
so I let his blatherings pass uncommented, and largely unread.
But I fail to see the benefit to the IETF, and I find it very easy to see
the harm.
Harald
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