On Feb 16, 2012, at 4:04 PM, John C Klensin wrote:
A current Last Call has apparently brought on another of the
"please tell all your friends to send in supportive notes, even
if they don't say much of anything substantive" campaigns that
we see from time to time. When those notes come from people who
do not routinely participate on IETF lists, they provide very
little real information unless we have suddenly taken up voting
or otherwise counting notes. Whatever we might otherwise think
of company positions, a note that said "I work for <xyz> and we
need this and intend to implement and deploy it" would be real
information that the community could consider where "I am an
individual and +1" does not. Sadly, such endorsements,
especially from people who are not active IETF participants, add
to the noise and might prevent someone who was still genuinely
trying to understand the pros and cons (presumably including all
of the IESG) from seeing a new and substantive argument, no
matter how well-grounded.
I note that there are some folks in the community who seem to
favor these campaigns when they like the cause and not if they
do not.
But I wonder whether, in the interest of noise reduction and/or
support of our "no voting, even by active participants"
position, there be any sympathy for a Godwin-like rule that the
first appearance of many no-information "I support this"
endorsements from people and constituencies who are not regular
participants on the IETF list should immediately trigger a state
in which all further statements from that "side" would be
ignored or would end the discussion entirely?
Yes, I see the difficulties in figuring out the details of such
a rule and implementing it and am mostly joking. Mostly.
Because we don't vote, the show of support with all the +1s really doesn't
amount to much. I don't think even promises to implement carry much weight at
last call. By the time some proposal has gone to last call, especially IETF
last call, the issue of whether this will be useful to someone should have
already been settled.
I think that an endorsement like "I work for Cisco and we intend to implement
this in every one of our products" is useful. But it's not nearly as useful as
"this is a terrible idea, and doing this will prevent IPv6 from ever gaining
traction". The objections raised in last call are really the point, not the
endorsements.
Yoav
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