Hi Harald,
- 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
How do you respond to those five people? Do you tell them that e-mail
filters were created for a reason? Do you ask them how hard it is to hit
'd' (or equivalent) once a month? Do you point out the inherent tension
between running an "open" organization and choosing who can participate
based on the quality of their contributions? Or do you encourage those
people to be upset about the IESG's supposed ineffectiveness in resolving
this issue, which you seem to consider a black-and-white issue while I,
personally, do not?
Personally, I consider this to be a very complex and difficult issue. We
have an RFC that does allow the IESG to indefinitely suspend the IETF
posting rights of an individual, and it provides some guidance for making
that decision. However, it is not a very precise document, and it is
clearly open to interpretation regarding both the definition of disruptive
behaviour and whether an individual needs to be _intentionally_ engaging in
disruptive behaviour in order to have has his/her posting privileges
suspended.
Personally, I am just as tired at this point of reading your poorly-founded
and repeated accusations against Jefsey as I am of reading Jefsey's posts on
this subject.
However, I'd like to address a few of the issues that you raised about one
of Jefsey's posts, in your recent message, in the hope of helping you to
understand that you might not be entirely objective about Jefsey's
contributions at this point.
- There isn't a common concept of "kitchen" between America
and France (as far as I know completely stupid)
I would be willing to yield to Jefsey on this one, as he has spent much more
time in France than I have. In fact, I am pretty sure that I have never
been in a kitchen in France... However, I did take U.S. high school French,
and I was taught that the word for "kitchen" in U.S. English translates to
"cuisine" in French, but that the word "cuisine" in French can translate to
"kitchen", "cook", or "a style of food" in English. So, I am not quite sure
that there is a direct translation between the English and French words for
"kitchen"... I'd have to ask a French person to be sure, though.
On the other hand, I am pretty sure that we all have some common Idea (in
the Platonic sense) of a room in which one cooks dinner (although some of us
might call it "supper").
If you are concerned that Jefsey's statement about kitchens is somehow
damaging misinformation, perhaps you could ask Jefsey to clarify what he
means or provide a reference? Or you could ask other French natives to
comment? On the other hand, if you just think that Jefsey may be slightly
mistaken (confusing a lack of clean translation between two words as an
indication that we do not have a shared concept), why not just ignore it,
like you would if anyone else made a similar mistake?
- There are languages that use the same word for blue and
green (as far as I know false)
I googled for "language blue green" and the first hit (Wikipedia) says:
"The English language makes a distinction between blue and green, but some
languages, such as Vietnamese or Tarahumara usually do not use separate
words for green and refer to that colour using a word that can also refer to
yellow or to blue. In Vietnamese, blue and green are denoted by xanh; blue
is specifically described as "xanh like the sky" and green as "xanh like the
leaves".
It is sometimes said that Japanese does not distinguish between blue and
green either. Modern Japanese does have words for both green (緑 midori) and
blue (\xA8焉扤扤い aoi adj.; \xA8焉扤扤 ao n.). However, ancient Japanese did not have
this
distinction: the word midori only came into use in the Heian period, and at
that time (and for a long time thereafter) midori was still considered a
shade of ao. Educational materials distinguishing green and blue only came
into use after World War II, during the Occupation: thus, even though most
Japanese consider them to be green, the word ao is still used to describe
certain vegetables, apples and vegetation. However, most other objects - a
green car, a green sweater, and so forth - will generally be called midori.
Welsh has different boundaries than English regarding blue and green. The
word glas is usually translated as 'blue'. It can also refer, variously, to
the colour of the sea, of grass, or of silver. The word gwyrdd is the
standard translation for 'green'. Glas (same spelling) is, comparably, the
translation for "green" in Irish, with specific reference to plant hues of
green; other shades would be referred to as uaine. In Irish, gorm is the
word for "blue" - the first part (gor(m)) pronounced as in the Welsh
gwyr(dd)."
Now, I don't personally care, but it seems that you may have been poorly
informed in this particular case.
- 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
I have looked at this document briefly, and it does seem to introduce some
interesting formal concepts and terms related to registry operation. While
I don't always have a lot of patience for formalism myself, there are
certainly people who believe that the IETF would benefit from more formalism
in many areas. In particular, people have rather often introduced ISO
terminology and formal concepts in the network management space for concepts
such as operational and administrative state. While we might argue about
whether this is a good approach, these suggestions are not usually
considered to be out-of-scope or intentionally disruptive.
I do think that Jefsey operates from a misconception about the IETF's role
in DNS and registry management, and that some of his comments and advice
would be better directed at ICANN. But, being confused about the division
between the IETF and ICANN in this area is not uncommon. In fact, I'm not
100% sure that I understand that division completely.
I have to admit that, at times, I find Jefsey's posts long and
hard-to-understand. There are many times when I don't read to the end of
them, but the same can be said for some of John Klensin's posts, and I
certainly don't want to see John removed from any of the lists I am on -- in
fact, I'd be glad to see him participate more! I have found that people
from some cultures (France, my own Irish heritage, MIT :-)) tend to be more
long-winded than others, and I think that we should try to be patient with
that.
I also have found that Jefsey's posts have a higher signal-to-noise ratio
than many peoples' posts, but I am willing to chalk some of that up to the
fact that he is a non-native English speaker who is trying to make himself
understood, and so I try to be patient with that, too.
What I have not found in Jefsey's posts to the IETF list is any _intent_ to
disrupt the IETF process. Nor have I found relentless ad hominem attacks
against individuals or enough off-topic information to warrant serious
action against him.
The biggest well-founded offense that Jefsey seems to be perpetrating is his
continued attempt to raise out-of-scope topics (such as IDN) on the
ietf-languages list. I can understand why you are tired of dealing with
that. However, I have not decided (as in, I have not yet made up my mind
and would like further input from others on this topic, particularly those
who have been affected by Jefsey's actions) whether that behaviour is
sufficiently disruptive to the IETF to warrant an indefinite suspension of
all of Jefsey's IETF posting rights.
Margaret
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