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Re: Final Announcement of Qualified Volunteers

2013-07-09 16:53:17

On Jul 9, 2013, at 2:07 PM, Ted Lemon <Ted(_dot_)Lemon(_at_)nominum(_dot_)com> 
wrote:

On Jul 9, 2013, at 4:58 PM, Scott Brim 
<scott(_dot_)brim(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
Is the great majority of the wisdom in the IETF incorporated into a
few megacorporations?

(That might reflect market share, in which case, is it a problem?)

I don't know the answer to that question, but it's an interesting question.   
But the reason I reacted to John Klensin's message earlier the way I did is 
that I think that the question of how biased toward the company's goals a 
nomcom participant will be has a lot to do with the individual candidate.   
And large companies do seem to tend to snap up long-time influential IETF 
participants, so indeed it is likely that over time IETF knowledge will tend 
to concentrate in one large company or another.

That being the case, the current two-person rule could as easily be argued to 
be damaging to the process as beneficial to it.   I'm not making a claim 
either way, but I think that absent statistically valid data, this discussion 
is completely theoretical.

Dear Ted,

From my experience, some projects have been thwarted through actions of a few 
companies.  The direction taken ended up being doomed which may have been the 
ultimate goal and potentially represents a real fairness issue IMHO.

Regards,
Douglas Otis