-----Original Message-----
From: Brian E Carpenter [mailto:brc(_at_)zurich(_dot_)ibm(_dot_)com]
Sent: Monday, March 27, 2006 4:04 AM
To: John C Klensin
Cc: Romascanu, Dan \(Dan\); ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: technical tutorials
Excuse front-posting but this will be short.
The EDU team discussed this very issue with the IAOC in
Dallas. There will be a draft revised charter for EDU out for
comment soon, but the short version is that (for the reasons
John gives) EDU will stick to classes aimed at the IETF's own
functioning. That doesn't exclude all tecnical material, but
as BCP 101 says, we don't do fund-raising ourselves.
We do have a friendly fund-raising body, the ISOC. If full
scale technical tutorials are to be sold, ISOC should be the vehicle.
Brian
John C Klensin wrote:
--On Sunday, 26 March, 2006 14:50 +0200 "Romascanu, Dan \\(Dan\\)"
<dromasca(_at_)avaya(_dot_)com> wrote:
I believe that I made this proposal in the past, in a
plenary session
a while ago, when numbers in the IETF particpation were the issue.
Discussions hold then led to the edu track, which is
however focused
on IETF process and not on technical or tutorial content.
I do not see why should not the IETF offer a full Sunday track of
tutorials with technical content. Why should one go to a industry
conference or trade show to hear what is going on in an
IETF WG, when
the principal contributors (WG chairs,
editors) who usually give these talks are all attending the IETF
meetings? Having a full Sunday track of tutorials would not only
attract new people to come to the IETF and help them
justify to their
employers and to themselves the cost of the travel, but
also improve
the level of understanding of the technical material in the WGs,
increasing the chances that new attendees would become active
participants in a shorter time.
We can even play with different fees structure (conference only,
tutorial only, conference + tutorial) to help people optimize their
costs.
The extra money resulting from the tutorial fees and increased
participation would lower sponsoring costs, and hopefully
the meeting
fees for the technical contributors.
Dan,
I see one major problem with this. I tried to raise it
with the EDU
team before Dallas but, other than one set of offline
comments from an
individual, have gotten no response.
Despite all of the noise in the IPR WG, the biggest risks to a
standards body involve claims that the review and approval process
have been captured or manipulated by particular interests,
causing the
documents that are produced to reflect those manipulations
rather than
open and balanced community consensus.
A tutorial whose subject matter is how to get things done
in the IETF
-- how we are structured, how we do business, the tools we use, and
even what one needs to know technically and structurally to
write an
I-D or RFC -- are not problematic.
But, as soon as we start giving technical tutorials that related to
areas that are under standardization, there is a risk of
someone later
claiming that the tutorial content was biased in one way or another
that impacted the standardization choices we made. That would be
extremely bad news... possibly of the variety that could
have the EDU
team or the IESG neck-deep in lawyers.
So, if there are to be technical tutorials, I suggest that
you start
working on an organizational structure that would keep the
decisions
about which sessions to hold and their content at arms-length or
further from anyone with decision-making leadership in the
IETF. Even
then, there are risks. But a decision made by an EDU team that
operates under even general IESG supervision, or with a
lecturer who
is involved in the standards process and who is taking
positions there
(or is associated with a company that is doing so), are really poor
ideas if we want to preserve both the fact and appearance
of fairness
in the standards process.
john
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