It is a useful fiction, but a fiction nonetheless.
If you work for a public company there is an enormous amount of
process involved when someone speaks for it. Even more so in the case
of government employees. You really do not want to have to go through
that process in order to suggest rewording the description of the
mwagref attribute.
The problem comes when people suggest that the IETF should never
listen to other bodies or other interests under any circumstances
whatsoever. And this is seriously suggested from time to time, most
often when it is obvious that the IETF position is ridiculous and the
only way to avoid facing the fact is to insist that other people's
opinions don't count at all. The proponents of this position do not
really mean 'never' of course, what they mean is that they don't want
to accept the validity of external opinions in the specific instances
where they find them inconvenient, only that would be rather harder to
justify with a straight face.
The first law of the Internet is that you are not in charge, for all
values of 'you'.
And that includes the IETF. The only time when the issue of people
speaking as individuals rather than their companies comes up in
practice is when some folk have got it into their heads that they can
use the IETF to impose their agenda on some other large party. So they
have to insist that the two Microsoft reps are speaking for nobody but
themselves and the fact that they have half a billion customers whose
interests just might be what is really being presented is utterly
irrelevant.
This form of thinking is nowhere near as common in the IETF as it was
a decade ago. Although some of the working groups that have taken that
approach are still in much the same condition now as they were then.
And so now that is one of the factors that tends to drive
fragmentation in the standards world. I note with some amusement that
a body whose founders decided that they just had to work outside IETF
process because the IETF process is too slow and they had to be
finished in a year are still working on their specs five years later.
On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 3:51 PM, Iljitsch van Beijnum
<iljitsch(_at_)muada(_dot_)com> wrote:
On 6 apr 2010, at 18:16, Mark Atwood wrote:
Cisco, IBM, MCI, or Linden Lab are not a "members" of the IETF. No agency
of the US government, or of any other government, is a "member" of the IETF.
No university, non-profit, PIRG, PAC, or other "concerned citizens group",
is a "member" of the IETF.
Only individual people can be "members" of the IETF. And "membership" is
mostly defined as "who shows up on the mailing list" and "who shows up at
the meetings".
True enough, but that's only one side of the equation. Cisco, IBM, etc, etc
as a rule don't send their people to the IETF to support the greater
Minneapolis area economy or other alturistic reasons: they want their people
to get stuff done at the IETF. As such, an IETF participant's affiliations
have relevance, and should be clear to all.
Considering that, it wouldn't be the worst idea to have everyone post mailing
list messages from an employee email address. Then again, I don't need that
kind of spam exposure on even more email addresses...
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
--
--
New Website: http://hallambaker.com/
View Quantum of Stupid podcasts, Tuesday and Thursday each week,
http://quantumofstupid.com/
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf