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Re: Newcomers [Was: Evolutionizing the IETF]

2012-11-10 05:36:45
Hi Arturo,
At 17:00 09-11-2012, Arturo Servin wrote:
    Your comment just reinforce my perception that the IETF is not
interested in being an global organization of standards.

There are some interesting observations in draft-jaeggli-interim-observations-03. For example:

  "Some entities related to the IETF clearly have outreach and advocacy
   as part of the mission, Internet Society, IETF chair, Liaisons, edu-
   team and so forth.  It is not clear to me, that beyond the scope of
   chartered working group documents that end up as part of the RFC
   series, that working group activities including meetings are well
   suited for use as an outreach mechanism."

A working group I participate in booked a slot during the last meeting. That slot, in my individual opinion, is not to be used for presentations. It is not to discuss matters which have not been discussion previously on the mailing list. If someone who has been reviewing drafts comes up and says: "I need some help as management is asking for travel justification", the person might get a few minutes of agenda time. If there is no justification for the slot except for that the WG session would be cancelled.

There was disagreement in the WG and it was not possible to resolve that through mailing list discussions. That led to the WG doing nothing for a month. The meeting provided an opportunity to resolve the problem. It would be a problem if the meeting was held in, for example, Canada, and most of the people doing the work [1] cannot attend.

I suggest that you ask Andy Newton why "IETF executives are considering selling URNBIS to a pharmaceutical outfit wishing to market sedative hypnotics" [2]. :-)

    People is asking how to evolve the IETF, well, one possibility is to
start thinking global and to reach more people outside the common
venues. It is more expensive, more complex, yes. But in my opinion is
worthy if we really want to show that we care about the multistakeholder
model that we preach.

The IETF is different from ICANN or the IGF. David Morris commented about ICANN meetings [3].

Riccardo Bernardini mentioned that [4]:

  "Q: Why did you not return?

  A: Because the necessity of being at meeting does not compensate for
  the cost.  Also I work at University, so I participate more to
  scientific conference than to engineering meetings. (Also, teaching
  duties do not help)"

Scott Brim commented that [5]:

  'Even back at the IETF at 20 celebration, when long-time participants got
   up and spoke passionately (and really well) about the shared mission and
   values, there were people listening who reacted with "that's not why I'm
   here, I think they're out of touch with the new IETF".'

    Hard times may come, some people will ask why the Internet standards
are just developed in some places and will challenge us. Frankly, what I

Yes.

There has been nine recent RFCs from South America, two from Africa and 312 from Asia, excluding Australia. There aren't any remote participants from Africa. There are some remote participants from Latin America. There is potential, in my humble opinion, from Latin America which can be turned into visible participation in the IETF. I'll mention an off-list comment: encourage people to participate in person, on the mailing lists and file drafts. I suggest talking to the IAOC to find out why the venues they looked into were not ok. Try and get CGI.br to help and find ways to make it ok. I doubt that IETF participants would say no if there is an opportunity to go to "cidade maravilhosa".

Regards,
-sm

1. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg75140.html
2. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/apps-discuss/current/msg06346.html
3. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg75782.html
4. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg75744.html
5. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg75768.html