Mark,
You (and Jordi) are at least partially right and I was probably
overreacting. So let me back up a little bit (inline below).
--On Tuesday, July 18, 2017 08:30 +0200 Mark Nottingham
<mnot(_at_)mnot(_dot_)net> wrote:
On 17 Jul 2017, at 11:08 pm, John C Klensin
<john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com> wrote:
* Precisely because the IETF has some very large vendors among
its supporters, our being able to continue to claim that we
are not biased toward those vendors and that our standards
decisions are not for sale, we need to be careful about not
forcing people to contribute to the bottom line of those
companies in order to participate.
How does linking to social media accounts constitute "forcing
people... in order to participate"?
With the qualification below, I can live with feeding
announcements through to selected social media sites in addition
maintaining the current announcement lists. The main thing that
concerns me (as usual) is slippery slopes, in which those
announcements segue into discussions in non-IETF forums that we
are all expected to track. That concern parallels my concern
about shifting mailing list discussions to github or various
wikis (and I know we might disagree about that).
No one is suggesting that one be required to tweet in order to
register an objection.
My reaction was just because we've seen other cases in which we
use some other system to announce or log or keep information and
it promptly leads a a subset of the community pointing out how
much more convenient they find that tool relative to, e.g.,
mailing lists and calls to make that use normal or required.
If we are agreed, and will stay agreed, that we won't go there,
then I have no problem.
We've been reasonably careful (much more careful
than some other SDOs) to not require someone to purchase some
particular work processing package or office suite to
participate. I suggest that, if the IETF is going to get
tied up with Social Media, the system(s) used must be ones
that do not have business models involving "user as
product", targeted advertising to users, permission to spam
users, or requirements that users give up significant privacy
in order to join, get feeds. or equ9ivalent.
You seem to be making a pretty big leap from "we don't require
you to use proprietary tools in order to participate"
(something that I very much agree with) to "we don't even want
the *appearance* of (very) indirect endorsement of large
companies."
See above.
I could understand a complaint that (for example) Sina Weibo
isn't in that list, but banning all such links seems to ignore
how much of the Internet is used today -- which isn't such a
good look for the body that purports to oversee the Internet's
protocols.
That is the other issue. Are we willing to feed
announcement-type information through to any plausible social
media site/ system for which there is a request? If not, what
is the stopping rule or criterion?
Again, if someone wants to re-{post,
chirp, tweet, vomit, etc.} materials from an IETF mailing
list, I think we have always allowed thet. However, IMO, the
IETF needs to be really careful about getting more directly
involved.
I'm not sure why you bring that up; how would we stop it?
Because I think there actually is a big difference between the
IETF doing something and some individual or organization picking
something up and carrying it elsewhere. If nothing else, there
is a question of how IPR rules, etc., would apply to reposted
materials given that they are not obviously IETF Contributions.
Again, if we confined this to announcements, I don't see a
problem either way.
If we wanted to --and I think it would be a disasterously bad
idea -- we could at least partially stop it the same way other
SDOs do -- imposing copyright or proprietary information rules
on access to the information and insisting it not be further
distributed and then making it clear that we would enforce those
rules. I hope we never go there or anywhere near it.
Again, apologies for the initial overreaction.
best,
john