On Sep 2, 2011, at 7:07 PM, Ned Freed wrote:
As far as our process is concerned, the question is, do we have rough
consensus to accept it? I think it's dubious that we have such consensus,
and
apparently so do others.
Simply put, I've watched the responses to this fairly closely, and I
completely
disagree with your assessment.
ok.
Personally I think this proposal is Mostly Harmless, so I'm willing to hold
my nose about it. But I'm very concerned about the argument that the
default
assumption should be that we change our process even in the absence of
consensus to do so.
Regarding the proposal, I get the impression that people are mostly in three
camps:
Well, none of these describe my own position, which is that eliminating the
three step process will at a minimum act as an incentive to move more
documents
along. (You, and most others engaging in this debate, routinely neglect the
psychological factors involved.)
I can easily name a dozen RFCs, all currently at proposed, that I for one will
be strongly incented to work to advance if this step is taken.
At the risk of playing devil's advocate, how will that help? Will the
specifications significantly improve in quality and interoperability improve as
a result? Will the blessing of these documents as Internet Standards result
in wider implementation and thus greater benefit to users? (not knowing which
RFCs you're talking about, I can't even guess)
From my perspective there's little problem with implementing and deploying at
Proposed and having documents stay at Proposed indefinitely, provided we can
ensure that the specifications are of high quality by the time they get to
Proposed. And given that people do tend to implement and deploy at Proposed,
there's only marginal benefit to promoting them to anything else - except on
those occasions where this serves as a carrot to fix bugs in the original spec
that people might otherwise live with. And it's not clear to me that the
proposed change increases the incentive to do either.
Additionally, by simplifying the process, we will gain essential insight into
where other problems lie. Without such simplification I see no chance at all
at
making progress on any of these issues.
Okay, I can see that as a possibility. Sometimes when undertaking a great
task, it doesn't matter what subtask you pick to do next, as long as you do
something. Momentum is often more important than doing things in order of
importance. My question is then, how many people think that we need to
undertake a great task where our process is concerned, and how many of those
think that given current political conditions, if we undertake such a task,
we're likely to end up with something substantially better than we have now?
(I'm open to the idea but skeptical)
1) Even if this is a baby step, it's a step in the right direction. Or even
if it's not a step in the right direction, taking some step will at least
make it possible to make some changes in our process. Maybe we'll not like
the results of taking this step, but at least then we'll have learned
something, and if the result is clearly worse we'll be motivated to change
it.
(I call this "change for the sake of change")
That last substantially and obviously mischaracterizes this position. In fact
I strongly recommend that you stop trying to summarize complex position with
cute - and utterly wrong - phrases like this. This is annoying and
quite unhelpful.
There are definitely cases where "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a
single step", I'm just skeptical that that argument applies in this specific
case.
2) Fixing the wrong problem doesn't do anything useful, and will/may serve
as a distraction from doing anything useful.
(I call this "rearranging the deck chairs")
3) People should stop arguing about this and just hold their noses about it,
because the arguing will make it harder to do anything else in this space.
(I call this "Oceana has always been at war with Eurasia". Ok, that's
probably too harsh, but it's what immediately comes to mind.)
Actually, I think there are a substantial numer of people who believe exactly
the opposite of this.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean here. Are you saying that there are a
substantial number of people who wish to make it harder to do anything at all
in this space, so they keep arguing about it? Or something else?
The arguments that people are giving in favor of approving this bother me
more than the proposal itself does. (I'm a firm believer that good decisions
are highly unlikely to result from flawed assumptions, and flawed assumptions
often affect many decisions. So challenging a widely-held flawed assumption
is
often more important than challenging any single decision.)
Well, the main argument I'm giving is based on my own perception of the effect
this will have on myself and similarly minded people as a contributor. If you
think that assessment is incorrect, then I'm sorry, but I think you're being
extraordinarily foolish.
I think you're in an excellent position to understand how approval or
disapproval of this document will affect your interest in doing work on the
documents you mentioned, and I'm sure you're not the only one who would be
encouraged by such a change to our process.
Keith
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