creating effective standards is a community activity to avoid the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
that would result if individuals and organizations all went their own way.
The common good is “the Internet works consistently for everyone” needs to
compete against “enough of the Internet works ok for my friends” where everyone
has different friends.
For voluntary standards to happen, you need rough consensus — enough people
agree to force the remainder to go along.
It’s a community activity, and for that to work there has to be a sense of
community. And video links with remote participation aren’t enough to create a
sense of community.
There are groups that purport t to manage with minimal face-to-face meetings,
but I think those are mainly narrow scope and a small number of relevant
players, or an already established community, and they regularly rely heavily
on 24/7 online chat, social media, open source tools, wikis which are
requirements for full participation.
The “hallway conversations” are not a nice-to-have, they’re how the IETF
preserves community with open participation.
One negative aspect of IETF “culture” (loosely, the way in which the IETF
community interacts) is that it isn’t friendly or easy to match and negotiate
with other SDOs, so we see the WHATWG / W3C / IETF unnecessary forking of URL /
URI / IRI, encodings, MIME sniffing, and the
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2014/03/.../RFC7159-JSON JSON competing
specs based at least partly on cultural misunderstandings.
The main thing nomcom needs to select for is technical leadership (the skill
of getting people to follow) in service of the common good). And nomcom
members should have enough experience to have witnessed successful leadership.
One hopes there might be some chance of that just by attending 3 meetings,
although the most effective leadership is often exercised in those private
hallway conversations where compromises are made.
Larry
—
http://larry.masinter.net