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Re: Common sense, process, and the nature of change

2012-11-08 15:37:02
Hi Ted,
At 11:46 08-11-2012, Ted Hardie wrote:
Thinking a bit about the directions that conversation took, I think
there is both a relatively simple answer to Andrew's question and a
much larger piece of context that need to be teased out of the
discussion.  The relatively simple answer is that we don't just use
common sense any more because we don't want to trust individuals as
much as we used to.  That lack of trust isn't directed at the current
IESG, IAOC,  or IAB, but at future incumbents.  We have come to the

The five second sound bite is "why don't you trust your leaders"?

idea that allowing a current set of office-holders to make ad hoc
decisions implies that all later incumbents will share that ability.

Yes.

Since we don't know those later incumbents (how could we?), we don't
trust them; since we don't trust them, we don't want to cede to them a
power that might later get abused.  So we attempt to use structure and
process to restrict those unknown future incumbents.  That's
interesting in part because we believe in precedent enough to worry
that ceding decision making will grant to later officer holders
equivalent power, but we don't believe in it enough to believe it will
guide what the later officer holders will do.  That, again, likely
stems from a lack of trust.

It's a bit more complicated than that. If there is a perceived lack of transparency, process may be viewed as safeguarding the individual's interest. I once had a chat with an IETF participant who asked what to do as the WG Chair took a bad decision. There were two options:

 (i)  The Standards Process

 (ii) Talk to the person

The person did not mention Option (ii). There is a newcomers' tutorial where people are lectured about the marvellous Standards Process. There is very little socialization in the IETF. The I* bodies are lacking when it comes to communication skills. Unfortunately, when the I* bodies communicates the community asks "why are you bothering us with this"?

I think that's where the larger context comes in.  The IETF is not
simply an engineering organization, it is a mission-based
organization.  Our mission is to make the Internet work and grow.

Frankly, I don't know what the IETF is.

Belief in that mission is something built into the context of the
IETF, and it is part of what helps each of us guide our decisions
here.  Where some SDOs get compromises entirely by horse-trading, many
of the compromises that let the IETF work by rough consensus actually
come about because of that shared mission.  We recognize that
compromise to get interoperability is a key part of what lets the
Internet continue to work and grow.  We both give our technical
insight to that mission and we subordinate our technical desires to
it.

It is difficult to get people to compromise.

I suspect that some of the trust issues we have with imagined future
incumbents actually comes from a subconscious fear that we won't be as
successful at passing on a belief in that mission as we have so far
been.  That may be because the current mechanisms are largely ad hoc
(as Joe's comments on mentoring hinted); it may be more free form than
that.  To counter that concern, we may want to extend the methods we
already do have (Edu teams, newcomers socials, and so on) for longer
parts of the initial participation periods.  We may even want to
consider new ways of generating affiliation to our core goals.
However we do it, it seems likely that energy put into making sure
that the IETF's mission is part of each participant's understanding of
their work will return benefits both to the IETF now and when those
unknown future incumbents take office.

I was pleasantly surprised by the level of comments at yesterday's plenary. The Edu team is absent except for a few hours a year. The newcomers' social is IETF-centric. I like the idea of extending the initial participation periods.

I read the last sentence as building trust. People might share your core goals if they "trust" you and they agree with the goals. That's different from convincing them. People put in energy if it is in their interest to do so.

Maintaining the power of the incumbents? Not important.  Maintaining
the current structures? Not important.  Change for change's sake?  Not
valuable.  Making sure the mission gets done?  Pretty much the only
thing that matters.

Agreed.

Regards,
-sm