Michael Thomas wrote:
Andy Bierman wrote:
Michael Thomas wrote:
I think the inability of the IETF to make decisions in
an open, deterministic, and verifiable manner is a major flaw.
It promotes indecision and inaction.
Is there any human decision making process that has all of these
characteristics? Or that even believes that those are axiomatic?
no, but there is some evidence that the IETF does not regularly
make timely and effective decisions, relative to the expectations
of the participants. IMO, this is due to a flawed process which
only works well in "landslide" decisions. The track record for
close or difficult decisions is not very good.
Dishonesty by the management is a problem regardless of what system we
have. Most wg's these days have two chairs, so collusion would need
to be
at least that deep, and probably require an AD to be on board too. If
that
really were the case, I doubt any system is likely to perform very well.
Only transparency can prevent corruption.
Preventing corruption is not the end product of the IETF. Producing
good/useful protocol specs is the end product of the IETF. Thus
"corruption" is just one consideration. Life is messy that way.
The end product is a document.
The document is a result of decisions made (or punted).
The text in the document is fair game for any kind of comment,
as long as the comment is made openly for everyone in the WG
to consider.
If there was an anonymous mailing service, such that people could
comment on WG issues without revealing their identity, then how
do we know everybody using the service will only make their comment
once? What is to prevent them from making the same comment N times,
hoping to deceive the WG into thinking the comments represent the
views of N people?
But this cultural thing does bug me. It seems unsatisfying to me that
our
pat answer to cultural differences is "become more western". The
language issue is already asking quite a lot of the rest of the world.
I don't see the cultural bias here.
Which culture are you from?
Kalifornia -- as if that matters.
The IETF is not an academic exercise.
I have found that people from the academic culture are appalled
at how their documents are treated by others in the IETF.
In the competitive culture of the IETF, documents are often
attacked (or ignored) in ways that are not common in the academic world.
This is unfortunate, but not enough of a reason to allow the
IETF decision making process to be even more murky and secretive.
Mike
Andy
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