Re: Facts, please, not handwaving [Re: Its about mandate RE: Why cant th

At 11:17 20/09/2006, Dave Cridland wrote:
> Well, I think there's a lot of confusion between the statement "We, 
> as engineers trying to maintain our scientific integrity as a whole, 
> consider this specification a good thing and recommend it", and "We, 
> as disinterested engineers trying to be practical and document what 
> gets used, note this specification is widely used".
The first statement best matches RFC 3935, except that "we" should be 
read as the IETF "leaders" (what is realistic in a rough consensus 
approach). The problem ("the near-impossibility of getting an 
informed consensus opinion on a complex subject out of a community of 
several thousand people in a short time") and this soliution is 
documented in part 3.
Also, "The Internet isn't value-neutral, and neither is the IETF. We 
want the Internet to be useful for communities that share our 
commitment   to openness and fairness.  We embrace technical concepts 
such as decentralized control, edge-user empowerment and sharing 
of   resources, because those concepts resonate with the core values 
of the IETF community.  These concepts have little to do with 
the   technology that's possible, and much to do with the technology 
that we choose to create." However,"we are also constrained by the 
principle of competence: Where we do not have, and cannot gather, the 
competence needed to make technically sound standards, we should not 
attempt to take the leadership." because "Sometimes the IETF 
leverages standards that are defined and maintained by other 
organizations; we continue to work with those organizations on their 
standards and do not attempt to take them over."
This creates many difficulties in world reality which is under 
distributed control, and therefore edge-user centric, working by 
subsidiarity, using concerted procedures and consensus, while we may 
chose to select parts of external standards and contradict their 
inner logic because they are not based on the same core values, or do 
not share our vision of these values.
The second statement seems therefore more appropriate. However this 
is only a reporting mission and we miss the IEB (Internet Engineer's 
Book) publication adequate system. We should therefore target some 
intermediate statement between "influence" and "report" and consider 
the RFC 3935 principles of responsiblity and competence, and the most 
inportant sentence "the benefit of a standard to the Internet is in 
interoperability - that multiple products implementing a standard are 
able to work together in order to deliver valuable functions to the 
Internet's users" remembering the quote above "Sometimes the IETF 
leverages standards that are defined and maintained by other 
organizations; we continue to work with those organizations on their 
standards and do not attempt to take them over". Interoperability 
must not be only within our own standards, but with the standards we 
leverage" we have the duty to respect and to know.
jfc










_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf