On Feb 14, 2015, at 1:04 AM, Larry Masinter <masinter(_at_)adobe(_dot_)com>
wrote:
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.
In my rather long experience in the IETF, what creates a sense of community is
working together on things.
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.
We are an already-established community.
The “hallway conversations” are not a nice-to-have, they’re how the IETF
preserves community with open participation.
I think the hallway conversations are great for getting things done, but I
don't agree that they are essential to preserving community.
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
thehttps://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2014/03/.../RFC7159-JSON JSON
competing specs based at least partly on cultural misunderstandings.
The unfriendliness of IETF culture is to a large extent a bug, not a feature.
I say to a large extent because the willingness to say unpleasant things is
necessary for technical excellence: you have to be willing to say "you are
wrong, and here's why." But we often don't even try to say it pleasantly, and
we often don't bother to say "and here's why," and this creates unnecessary
difficulties for newcomers and for people who aren't good at taking criticism
(which is most people).
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.
One of the things that I tried to do during my tenure as AD was to communicate
more than is typical on the IETF mailing list. This is a double-edged sword:
it's more public and more memorable than the other contexts in which ADs
attempt to exhibit leadership, and you are less likely to get people to
actually follow you. That's okay, because leadership isn't actually about
telling people what to do--it's about figuring out where the consensus should
go, and trying to get it to go in one of the good directions it could go rather
than a bad direction. But when you do that in public and on the record it
doesn't always look like leadership, and of course you don't always understand
the consensus well enough or pick the right direction.
Nevertheless, the idea that nomcom people wouldn't be exposed to examples of
leadership on mailing lists is completely wrong, IMHO. If a candidate hasn't
shown leadership in that context, they aren't a good candidate.