RE: Improving the ISOC Fellowship programme to attract people from under-represented regions into the IETF
On Oct 12, 2013 6:51 AM, "Adrian Farrel" wrote: > I don't understand your assertion that there is no procedure in the IETF to > support the existence of a Design Team. I'd be sorry to see this discussion dragged down a procedural rathole. Melinda
Re: leader statements
On 10/10/13 10:52 AM, Noel Chiappa wrote: > I'm not sure this is true. The IETF worked quite well (and produced a lot of > good stuff) back in, e.g. the Phill Gross era, when I am pretty sure Phill's > model of his job was indeed as a 'facilitator', not a 'leader' in the sense > you seem to be thinking of. So why do we now need a 'leader'? Because we've got more than 120 working groups, thousands of participants, and the internet is now part of the world's communications infrastructure. I don't like hierarchy but I don't know how to scale up the organization without it. Melinda
Re: leader statements
On 10/10/13 9:49 AM, manning bill wrote: > the "leaders" are there to inform and moderate the discussion and > where possible, indicate that consensus has been reached (or not). > when "leaders" speak out on behalf of organization -particularly- > this organization and they are _NOT_ relaying the consensus of the > group at large, they have exceeded their remit. I really think we need to stop behaving as if the IETF is a small group of people who know each other well. Consensus decision-making does not scale well with the number of participants, and if we're going to require consensus on every leadership decision we're not going to get anything done. Now, being frozen and inactive may be preferable to having Jari and Russ go off and make a cooperative public statement about internet governance, but it seems to me that as long as we have recall and appeals processes we have incentives for IETF and IAB chairs, and IESG and IAB members, not to go off and do controversial things unilaterally, as well as a remedy if they do. Melinda
Re: Last Call: (On Consensus and Humming in the IETF) to Informational RFC
On 10/9/13 4:35 AM, Ted Lemon wrote: > On Oct 9, 2013, at 1:30 AM, Melinda Shore > wrote: >>> Rough consensus - An agreement by almost everyone that the >>> proposed >> That's a lot like voting, I think. > It's worse than voting, because it encourages people to invite their > friends to sway the consensus. Excellent point. Melinda
Re: Last Call: (On Consensus and Humming in the IETF) to Informational RFC
On 10/8/13 9:20 PM, Loa Andersson wrote: > FWIW - my personal way of thinking about consensus vd. rough consensus, > please note that it my personal view not a definition. > > Consensus - An agreement by everyone in a group that a proposed > solution is the best of all of all possible solutions > > Rough consensus - An agreement by almost everyone that the proposed That's a lot like voting, I think. Melinda
Re: Last Call: (On Consensus and Humming in the IETF) to Informational RFC
On 10/8/13 3:21 PM, Fred Baker (fred) wrote: > To my small and somewhat naive mind, the difference between rough > consensus on a topic and a vote on the same topic is something about > winners and losers. In a purely political process, when a set of > parties vote on something and the preponderance (by some definition > of "preponderance") say something, the views of the losing set of > parties are deemed irrelevant. In IETF process, and hopefully in any > technical process, there is understanding that the parties who > disagree may have valid reasons to disagree, and a phase of > negotiation. When we talk about "rough consensus", I understand it to > mean - and would like to believe that we all understand it this way - > that we investigate the reasons for disagreement, perhaps discover > that some of them are valid, and address those issues to the > satisfaction of those who raised them. As a result, the ultimate > solution, even though it may not be the specific solution we would > all have designed or selected, is one that in fact addresses all > known issues. While we may not all agree, we don't disagree. I've done a lot of work on consensus over the years and I think this is fundamentally correct, although I'd amend the last sentence to something along the lines of "While we may not all agree, those who disagree can live with it." That is to say, it's not a binary question, and sometimes things we disagree with just aren't showstoppers. (I'd like to see people take that position more often - for some reason a lot of people seem to take disagreement as a reason to block a decision even when it doesn't matter that much). Melinda
Re: Review of: draft-resnick-on-consensus-05
On 10/6/13 4:34 PM, Mark Nottingham wrote: > On 07/10/2013, at 11:03 AM, Dave Crocker wrote: >> 1. in a natural state; without decoration or other treatment. "a >> diamond in the rough" >> 2. in difficulties. "even before the recession hit, the project was >> in the rough" > I think he's using it in the sense that it's used on a golf > course... I think that's pretty clearly the case, although it might be confusing in juxtaposition with "rough consensus," where "rough" means "approximate." I'm not sure it's a big deal and I don't want to lawyer the document to death. We could spin in circles for years trying to nail down "current practice." Part of the problem that this document addresses is that some current practice is anathema to consensus processes, not because IETF process is wrong and needs modification but because some chairs, I* folk, etc., aren't very skilled at managing consensus. Melinda
Re: Last calling draft-resnick-on-consensus
On 10/6/13 1:03 PM, Jari Arkko wrote: > My goal is to publish it as an Informational RFC. It is an > explanation of principles and how they can be applied to productively > move IETF discussions forward. While there is no change to IETF > processes or any presumption that guidance from this document must be > followed, I have found the document very useful. It has been referred > to numerous times in IETF and IESG discussions. Consensus is hard and > many WG discussions have complex trade-offs and differing opinions. I > believe having this document become an RFC would help us apply the > useful principles even more widely than we are doing today. Glad to hear it - I think this is an enormously useful document. I'm wondering if wg chair training at an upcoming meeting can't be spent on it. Vancouver's too soon, but what about London? Melinda
Re: ORCID - unique identifiers for contributors
On 9/18/13 8:59 AM, Spencer Dawkins wrote: > There have been (counting me) four sitting ADs posting on this 90-email > thread, plus another six or so former ADs, including a former IETF > chair, plus at least six or so WG chairs, plus other participants of > good mind and good hearts. I'm thinking that if it was possible to > reason what the right answer should be, we would have all agreed. I found the discussion incredibly annoying because for the most part the people raising issues didn't understand what the ORCID identifier represents, they don't understand who its audience is, they don't understand how bibliographic metadata are used, etc., and yet they plowed on, undeterred by their own lack of familiarity with the problem space. I think it is possible to reason what the right answer should be, but not in this environment. Melinda
Re: [IETF] Re: ORCID - unique identifiers for contributors
On 9/17/13 1:08 PM, Warren Kumari wrote: > On Sep 17, 2013, at 4:52 PM, Yoav Nir wrote: >> Having an IETF identity is OK if all you ever publish is in the >> IETF. Some of our participants also publish at other SDOs such as >> IEEE, W3C, ITU, and quite a few publish Academic papers. Using the >> same identifier for all these places would be useful, > > Would it? Why? It's useful to librarians/archivists/people who organize things. Melinda
Re: ORCID - unique identifiers for contributors
On 9/17/13 11:14 AM, Michael Tuexen wrote: > For example > http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3237.txt > has 7 authors. I know that at least 4 affiliations have changed > and at least you can't reach me anymore via the given e-mail > address or telephone number. This is not the problem ORCID addresses, except indirectly. It's a way to establish that the author Melinda Shore who worked at Cisco is the same author Melinda Shore who worked at the Center for Research Libraries. It is NOT a contact mechanism, a personal tracking mechanism, etc. Melinda
Re: ORCID - unique identifiers for contributors
On 9/17/13 9:55 AM, Michael Tuexen wrote: > ... and that is my point. One level of indirection might be useful here. > I would prefer to update only one mapping and not go through a list > of RFCs and change the mapping for each document. I really think that you all are completely over-engineering this. But that's what I think. What I *know* is that you're looking at this from the perspective of IETF contributors. Librarians have a problem, too, and the ORCID stuff primarily addresses that problem, not ours. There's been a long history of difficulty in name usage on documents and that's confounded librarians, who for some reason (<- sarcasm) feel the need to be able to group works by the same author. This has been dealt with through authority control mechanisms, where the cataloger tries to ascertain if a given "Scott Smith" is the same person as one of the many other Scott Smiths already in the catalog, and if not, creates a new authority record. Discrimination is encoded in the authority records in the form of middle names/initials, dates of birth and death, etc. Again, this is something the *cataloger* does, and it's actually rather difficult. So, in a cataloging record the contents of the author field are normalized under authority control and the author name as it appears on the title page is carried in the body of the cataloging record, and not indexed. There's a quite good discussion of this here: http://kcoyle.blogspot.com/2007/09/name-authority-control-aka-name.html What ORCID does is allow the author to help catalogers out by providing a unifying identifier. It's not intended to be authenticative or provide identity information - it just helps group documents (which is why I think it belongs in a separate piece of metadata). I don't think this is a huge deal and i don't think it requires community consensus. I imagine most IETF authors, who for the most part are not academics, will bother with it, and that's just fine. Melinda
Re: ORCID - unique identifiers for contributors
On 9/17/13 9:22 AM, Pat Thaler wrote: > Given this comment in John Levin's post: " PS: Now that I think about > it, you can already put in a personal URL in rfc2xml, so if someone > wants to use an ORCID URL, they can do so right now." it seems like > there isn't any need to change the schema. I'd agree that there isn't a *need* but I would agree that for it to be valuable as metadata it ought to (the word "should" is forever tainted) be a new child element of the name element. Melinda
Re: ORCID - unique identifiers for contributors
On 9/17/13 3:56 AM, Andy Mabbett wrote: > Thank you. So how might we raise awareness of ORCID among RfC > contributors and and encourage its use by them? I'm not sure much needs to be done other than talking with Heather Flanagan (the RFC Editor), getting her sign-off, and then getting it into the xml2rfc schema and noting its existence. I hope that what's going on here is *not* that there's been little uptake and you're trying to promote its use. Melinda
Re: ORCID - unique identifiers for contributors
On 9/16/13 3:41 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > Fair enough, but adding a public key to the record would enable > authentication too. I suppose it was inevitable that when it came into the IETF it would balloon into an overcomplicated mess. Think of it as one metadata element, not a big blob of metadata elements. Look at it this way: it's a classification tool. Classification has two functions - to group things which are like and to distinguish things which are unlike. That's all this does. Melinda
Re: ORCID - unique identifiers for contributors
On 9/16/13 1:02 PM, Yoav Nir wrote: > If we use ORCID instead of email, we get less strong authentication. That's not its job - it's there to distinguish between authors with similar names. As I understand the proposal the intent is to have it provide additional information, not supplant anything. There is currently no identifier that provides that kind of discrimination. I don't see any real downside to allowing people who have ORCIDs to put them in IETF documents. I'm not sure there's a lot of demand for them (this is the first time it's come up, as far as I know) but I don't see a problem with plopping one more piece of information - one that has a unique function - into our docs. Melinda
Re: ORCID - unique identifiers for contributors
On 9/16/13 6:49 AM, Dave Cridland wrote: > That's not to say you can't put any particular URI against your name in > an RFC, mind, but I'd be rather hesitant to leap at mandating a > registration procedure for authors. I think it's an interesting idea. It might be worth talking with Heather and with whoever maintains the xml2rfc schema about whether or not we can or should experiment with adding an ORCID element to the name element. Melinda
Re: pgp signing in van
On 9/6/13 7:45 PM, Scott Kitterman wrote: > They have different problems, but are inherently less reliable than web of > trust GPG signing. It doesn't scale well, but when done in a defined context > for defined purposes it works quite well. With external CAs you never know > what you get. Vast numbers of bits can be and have been spent on the problems with PKI and on vulnerabilities around CAs (and the trust model). I am not arguing that PKI is awesome. What I *am* arguing is that the semantics of the trust assertions are pretty well-understood and agreed-upon, which is not the case with pgp. When someone signs someone else's pgp key you really don't know why, what the relationship is, what they thought they were attesting to, etc. Melinda
Re: pgp signing in van
On 9/6/13 7:04 PM, Ted Lemon wrote: > It's not at all clear to me that "serious" trust mechanisms should be > digital at all. They're not. > Be that as it may, we have an existence proof that > a web of trust is useful—Facebook, G+ and LinkedIn all operate on a > web of trust model, and it works well, and, privacy issues aside, > adds a lot of value. I'm not quite sure how we got from the question of how to do crypto better as a means to provide stronger privacy protections to the value of Facebook, to be honest. Possibly because of the key signing proposal. But here's some anecdata. Got a FB friend request from someone I didn't know, checked him out and we seemed to have quite a few friends in common, so I accepted. When he did, in fact, turn out to be a jerk I wrote to some of the friends-in-common and it turns out that nobody knew who he was - a few people with lax friending policies had accepted his friend requests and that formed the basis for a bunch of the rest of us assuming he'd be okay. At any rate I think it's pretty clear that the semantics of pgp signing are not agreed-upon and that's led to a lack of clarity around individual decisions about key signing. I find pgp useful for sloppy, casual, but easy-to-use crypto but I certainly wouldn't want to use it as the basis for assurances about identity, etc. Melinda
Re: pgp signing in van
On 9/6/13 6:24 PM, Ted Lemon wrote:
> It's naive to think that keys are any more trustworthy than this,
> because any signature's trustworthiness is only as good as the
> trustworthiness of the individual who decides to sign it. If you
> trust a key signed by someone you don't know, but who someone you
> know trusts, just how trustworthy is that?
I actually don't think that pgp is likely to be particularly
useful as a "serious" trust mechanism, mostly because of
issues like this. I don't believe that it's an argument for
less rigor in how we assign trust to signatures but rather
an example of several underlying problems, including lack
of agreement about what it actually means to sign something,
acknowledgment that you don't know much about how the
people whose keys you're signing think about trust ("My friends
are fine but some of their friends are jerks"), etc.
One of the useful things that PKI provides is some agreement,
at least, about what we expect from certification authorities
and what it means to issue and sign a certificate. That is
to say, the semantics are reasonably well sorted-out, which is
not the case with pgp.
Melinda
Re: pgp signing in van
On 9/6/13 5:09 PM, Ted Lemon wrote: > This is what I mean by "a high bar." Signing someone's PGP key > should mean "I know this person as X," not "this person is X." I have no idea what "should" means in this context. It seems to me, from looking at this discussion (as well as from other discussions around this topic) that different people have different trust models in mind with quite possibly no two alike. I guess part of the question here is whether not PGP key signatures entail the signer being willing to vouch that the key holder is who they say they are. I'm not sure why "I know this person as " provides much more reliability than someone asserting their own identity. Melinda
Re: pgp signing in van
On 9/6/13 4:10 PM, Ted Lemon wrote: > On Sep 6, 2013, at 6:42 PM, Joe Touch wrote: >> I've noted elsewhere that the current typical key-signing party >> methods are very weak. You should sign only the keys of those who >> you know well enough to claim you can attest to their identity. > This is a ridiculously high bar. The bar should be about at the > level of a facebook friend request. People's personal policies about Facebook friend requests seem to be all over the map, so I'm not sure what that means in practice. I'm not sure that's a great model in any event, since when you vouch for someone's identity - in an authoritative trust system - you're also vouching for the authenticity of their transactions. Those transactions would also include *them* making attestations about the identity of people you've likely never heard of. Melinda
Re: Bruce Schneier's Proposal to dedicate November meeting to saving the Internet from the NSA
On 9/5/13 8:59 PM, Randy Bush wrote: > side discussion wonders whether bruce may be a bit on the > pollyanna side on this aspect. That's a really interesting question, and I have no idea what the answer is. One reason it's interesting is that until this all broke there was a reasonable assumption that as long as you were more inconvenient to compromise than your neighbors, you were safe. That actually appears not to be the case at all where eavesdropping is concerned. Melinda
Re: Bruce Schneier's Proposal to dedicate November meeting to saving the Internet from the NSA
On 9/5/13 7:19 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > I'm not talking about what implementors and operators and users > should be doing; still less about what legislators should or > shouldn't be doing. I care about all those things, but the question > here is what standards or informational outputs from the IETF are > needed, in addition to what's already done or in the works. There are pretty clearly still some serious problems around crypto and usability. I tend to look at those problems as largely being implementation questions. But still, it may be the case that there's work that can be done to protect leaking what might be called signaling (or metadata). This assumes, of course, that current crypto technology (ciphers, anyway) is sufficient, which Schneier seems to think is the case. Melinda
Re: draft-moonesamy-ietf-conduct-3184bis
On 9/3/13 6:58 PM, Scott Kitterman wrote: > I agree that trying to figure things out is a net positive. What I want to > avoid is someone making excuses claiming that since they aren't a native > speaker it's somebody else's problem to understand them. I'd like to think that we're going to retain at least some small vestige of common sense in the future (although it's looking questionable). I suppose one could argue the reverse, that by failing to include this as a guideline we may be empowering native English speakers to complain that non-native English speakers are not making a good faith effort to understand something. But hey, let's be sensible, right? In maritime navigation and other sets of "rules of the road," it's generally the case that the vessels or vehicles or skiers or whomever that are faster more maneuverable are responsible for avoiding collisions with those who are less maneuverable. I think this is a pretty good rule of thumb. Melinda
Re: draft-moonesamy-ietf-conduct-3184bis
On 9/3/13 6:50 AM, Scott Kitterman wrote: > I think that is a given without having pre-emptive blame assignment in the > text. *Blame*? I know that I've inadvertently used regional idioms that were hard for non-native speakers to understand and I've been grateful when it's been pointed out. Trying to figure out where things get confusing and correcting that is a net positive for the organization. Characterizing that process as "blame" is not. We're supposed to be engineers. Let's fix stuff. Melinda
Re: draft-moonesamy-ietf-conduct-3184bis
On 8/31/13 10:15 PM, Scott Kitterman wrote: > That does seem better, but don't all parties have an obligation to attempt to > communicate clearly? Yes, but ... I think it's particularly incumbent on native English speakers to avoid highly idiomatic or stylized language - English that is not taught to non-native speakers. It may be better to say something along those lines, although I don't think you can go too wrong in remind people to communicate clearly. (This is not entirely unrelated to the seeking consensus issue) Melinda
draft-moonesamy-ietf-conduct-3184bis
It seems like this would be a good time for an update. A few comments: . I think there are a few things that we've been taking for granted that everybody knows, because they did, but that may not longer be the case and consequently they should be made explicit. One that really popped out at me while reading this is that we may need to be clearer that people are participating in the IETF as individuals and contributions are evaluated in that light . I'd like to see some mention of consensus-seeking behavior; that is to say, we make decisions on the basis of rough consensus and so the goal of discussion should be to build consensus rather than to "win." . I'm not 100% comfortable with the concept of "violating guidelines . I think it was a good idea to remove text that could be discouraging to new participants. Melinda
Re: Rude responses (sergeant-at-arms?)
On 8/27/13 9:11 AM, Ted Lemon wrote: > I would expect the sergeant-at-arms to be reining in that sort of > rudeness before reining in the sort of supposed overt rudeness that > we are discussing here. That suggestion makes me want to say something a little rude. Managing the discussion is the chair's job, not the sergeant- at-arms's. Melinda
Re: Charging remote participants
On 8/16/13 9:53 AM, John C Klensin wrote: > As someone who favors charging remote participants, who has paid > most or all of the travel and associated costs for every meeting > I've attended in the last ten plus years, and who doesn't share > in a view of "if I can, everyone can", let me make a few > observations. I think these are good points, and I'd like to add: the extent to which there's now an expectation that someone must participate in a meeting in order to contribute to work is the extent to which there's been a gradual shift in working methods in the organization, and effectively reflect a loss (to whatever extent) of openness. We can stay free and open if mailing lists remain the locus of the IETF's work. The costs associated with remote participation have to be borne by someone; the marginal cost of someone joining an existing mailing list is effectively zero. Melinda
Re: Community Input Sought on SOWs for RFC Production Center and RFC Publisher
On 8/12/13 11:36 PM, Riccardo Bernardini wrote: > Anyway, I use Linux, so I guess I will not be able to give my input about it. I agree in principle (MS document formats are not a suitable document exchange format for an open standards body) but in truth, it's been awhile since Open Office hasn't been able to read .doc files correctly. I'd rather not see any .doc, .ppt, etc. files in the future but I don't think it's correct to say that their use excludes people on different platforms or with different software. Melinda
Re: [iaoc-rps] RPS Accessibility
On 8/6/13 11:58 AM, Joe Abley wrote: > For what it's worth (not much) I would miss the line at the mic. > There are useful conversations that happen within the line that I > think we would lose if the mic followed the speaker, and I also think > that pipelining the people at the mic promotes more fluid > conversation. But these are minor points, and I'm mainly just waxing > nostalgic. I actually think that this is not a small point. The people in line are the people with issues and the ability to hash stuff out quickly is pretty nice. Melinda
Re: procedural question with remote participation
We're all different, and for my purposes, in all honesty, having slides unavailable until 45 seconds before a session start hasn't been an issue as a remote participant. It's definitely aggravating as a chair, though, since we need to get those uploaded via the meeting materials manager. Overall, though, I'd say my feelings about this are substantially similar to Stephen Farrel's: So I'd say working on ways to make remote participation better while not making f2f participation more of a pain would be the way to go. And it's unclear to me that having slides available a week before a session would improve remote participation much. Melinda
Re: The Friday Report (was Re: Weekly posting summary for ietf@ietf.org)
On 8/4/13 11:53 AM, John Levine wrote: > As far as I can tell, one person objects, everyone else thinks it's fine. More to the point, the objections that are being raised appear to be bogus and based in a misunderstanding of how the IETF operates. Melinda
Re: 6tsch BoF
On 8/1/13 12:54 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > In the case of a WG-forming BOF, it seems to me that a nucleus > of people willing and competent to do the work, and a good set of > arguments why the work needs to be done and how it will make the > Internet better, are more important than any kind of numbers game. Yes, and "Who here is planning on contributing to this effort if we're chartered?" is an entirely different question from "Who here thinks we should charter a working group?" Finding consensus is not simply a matter of asking a particular question at a given point in time. It's a process. I cannot recommend strongly enough that people spend time with Pete's document: http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-resnick-on-consensus/ Melinda
Re: 6tsch BoF
On 8/1/13 1:29 AM, joel jaeggli wrote: > Consensus for any particular outcome is in the end a judgment call. Well, yes and no, but this situation strikes me as odd, and probably a mistake on the part of the chairs. If you can't tell whether or not you've got consensus, you don't have consensus. It sounds like they were treating the hum as a vote in the first place (which we do entirely too often). Melinda
Re: making our meetings more worth the time/expense
I have to say that I was very impressed with how the oauth session went. There was minimal presentation and maximal discussion, and the discussion was not interrupted until it started getting circular. But, I suspect that this is a reflection of the fact that there's some substantial disagreement about not just narrowly-defined issues, but some architectural models that people are working from, that there's a very large number of interested parties, there are time pressures and expectations from external bodies, etc. The discussion would have been lively no matter how the meeting was managed. But, I thought it was very well-done. The challenge is how to have meetings that productive when there are far fewer interested parties, fewer disagreements, etc. It may be the case in some instances that if it's going to be nothing but presentations there may not be a need for a working group to meet at all. Melinda
Re: Bringing back Internet transparency
On 7/30/13 12:29 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > Users want applications to just work, but they (and many business > managers in our "industry") don't understand that when applications > fail unpredictably, it's often because of glitches in what we call > transparency. I suspect applications are not failing unpredictably often enough, seriously enough, or impossible-to-fix-edly enough (thank you, I'm here all week) to provide incentive for radical change in the network, which elimination of problematic middleboxes would certainly represent. There are several things going on now that I think hold some promise for overall approaches to improving the situation but it's just hard to work on middlebox problems in the IETF because you can't avoid getting bogged down in rehashing the same ideological debates over and over and over again. Yes, problematic middlebox behavior causes real-world problems but cursing the darkness hasn't yet been productive and I'm reasonably sure that it never will be, particularly in a world where vendors are churning out those cursed boxes and network operators and data centers are buying them. > However, we are in an arms race here. Every step to improve transparency > will be met by a further step in middleboxes that nibbles away at > transparency. We've been debating this for 15 years; have you seen > any real change in the balance of power? I'm not sure there is a balance of power between the people selling middleboxes and the IETF. In fact, I'm rather certain there isn't. Melinda
Re: Bringing back Internet transparency
On 7/30/13 7:59 AM, Keith Moore wrote: > I don't think that's the problem; I think the problem is that most > users don't realize how much lack of transparency is harming them. > So "transparent Internet access" isn't a commodity.Transparency > would be cheaper if there were more demand for it, and there would be > more demand for it if people realized how much more utility they'd > get out of the Internet if they had it. decades in, I suspect that if there were going to be demand for "transparency" we'd be seeing it by now. If VoIP wasn't the kick in the pants that's been needed to change things, it's difficult to imagine what else might be. Melinda
Re: Remote participants, newcomers, and tutorials
On 7/27/13 8:23 PM, l.w...@surrey.ac.uk wrote: >> I would be very sorry to see IETF *working* meetings turned into >> something closer to conferences, > with poster sessions! A! Melinda
Re: Remote participants, newcomers, and tutorials
On 7/27/13 8:13 PM, Randy Bush wrote: > yup. i guess it is time for my quarterly suggestion to remove the > projectors and screens. Then I guess it's time for my quarterly "I'd be good with that." Melinda
Re: Remote participants, newcomers, and tutorials
On 7/27/13 3:52 PM, Aaron Yi DING wrote: > What do you mean by conference? too much information inferred in your > term that may confuse others on the list. Will appreciate, if you can > share bit more on it, behind the single term "conference" that you > particularly don't like. I love conferences but I'd hate to see IETF meetings turned into them. By "conference" I mean something in which people give papers (or other talks) and most of the participants have an audience role. IETF meeting participation should be active. It is almost always the case, of course, that someone attending a meeting will sit in on working groups in which they're not active, but it should be unusual for someone who has no particular work in the IETF and who's active in no working groups and active on no mailing lists to come to a meeting. IETF meetings are places to get work done. > I agree with you that changing the working culture in WG meetings can be > bad, and we shall not go out of the ways to accommodate anything under > the name of "diversity". I actually do think we should go out of our way to accommodate and encourage diversity, but again, that's in the interest of getting work done (and getting our work correct). But back to the original question of how to bring newcomers in through remote participation - I would start with the assumption that they'd be participating, remotely or otherwise, because they have some networking problem (and possibly solution) that needs standardization. I'd also assume that they've done a basic literature search, etc. I wonder if it would be worthwhile to put together some material (video or otherwise) that would help people decide whether or not their problem belongs in the IETF. Melinda
Re: Remote participants, newcomers, and tutorials
On 7/27/13 1:38 PM, Moriarty, Kathleen wrote: > I think it would be really helpful/useful if working groups could > provide short video overviews to help people understand the work. > This includes newcomers and also interested observers, who may > include implementers. Can that be accommodated, maybe at a future > meeting? I am happy to help if I can. I'm sorry, but no, I am not comfortable with this. If someone wants to go off on their own and do something along these lines, more power to them, but we have working group charters, we've got framework documents, and presumably people can read. I would be very sorry to see IETF *working* meetings turned into something closer to conferences, or to dumbing things down to accommodate newcomers who I gather from discussion so far don't have anything particular in mind. I've participated remotely quite a bit and I do think that having the newcomers session available to remote participants would be a big win (and there's something that I think it would be helpful to record on video and make available on Youtube or some such). It may be the case over the longer term that we've got so many newer participants who won't adapt to the IETF's working style that the IETF will need to become more like other standards bodies to accommodate them, but I don't think we're there yet and I would be sorry to see working meetings turned into conferences. People who attend should be participants, not audience. Melinda
Re: Remote participants access to Meeting Mailing Lists was Re: BOF posters in the welcome reception
On 7/24/13 10:35 AM, Eric Gray wrote: > These lists are not - AFAIK - intended for "meeting participation" > anywhere near as much as they are for meeting logisitics. My experience has been that they're for both, and while I'll be a remote participant this time I've already subscribed to the 87attendees list. I don't think it's accurate to describe putting up a mailing list to which people may or may not choose to subscribe as "jumping through hoops," although I will say that I think we should be "jumping through hoops" to enable broader participation and to improve remote participation. Melinda
Re: BOF posters in the welcome reception
On 7/24/13 12:30 AM, John C Klensin wrote: > Yes. I was thinking a bit more generally. For example, > schedule changes during the meeting week, IIR, go to NNall, and > not ietf-announce. As a remote participant, one might prefer > to avoid the usual (and interminable) discussions about coffee > shops, weather, and the diameter of the cookies, but it seems to > me that there is a good deal of material that goes to the two > meeting lists that would be of use. Since I'm on those lists in > spite of being remote (registered and then cancelled), I can try > to keep track of whether anything significant to remote > participants appears on the meeting discuss list this time if it > would help. Yes, the meeting mailing lists are here: http://www.ietf.org/meeting/email-list.html Melinda
Re: Regarding call Chinese names
On 7/11/13 4:14 AM, Hui Deng wrote: > I personally feel that this is maybe one of not easier part for western > people to do in today IETF. and chinese's names sound maybe more > diffcult than other eastern languages. I know it is for me, and I'm grateful for the draft. I agree that this is probably not appropriate for publication as an RFC but it would certainly be useful to find someplace for it in the wiki. The chairs wiki might be an option but I think it's of broader interest and use. Melinda
Re: The Nominating Committee Process: Eligibility
On 6/27/13 5:08 AM, Cullen Jennings wrote: > I have attended some IETF meetings remotely and I am not in favor of this > change. To be honest, I'm skeptical, myself. I have attended a lot of meetings remotely and I don't think that it provides enough context to be able to provide the background for critical decisions about leadership. I'm also not sure what problem it's trying to solve. Melinda
Re: SHOULD and RECOMMENDED
On 6/24/13 12:18 PM, Yoav Nir wrote: > - What are the subtle differences in meaning between these two > sentences? I think "I recommend" is rather clearly different from "you should," in terms of strength and (in the case of normative text) obligation. I don't think that "recommend" is useful in the context of an RFC, may be confusing and a bit subtle, and is probably best avoided. Melinda
Re: Is the IETF is an international organization?
On 6/19/13 12:40 PM, Ted Lemon wrote: > Sorry. That was directed largely at Melinda who is, to the best of > my understanding, an American. Binational. Thanks for asking. Melinda
Re: IETF Diversity
On 6/19/13 10:16 AM, Doug Barton wrote: > It's not clear to me how this example relates to the IETF. Even in fields in which the overwhelming majority of practitioners, the majority of people in leadership or management positions are men. Everybody's got good intentions - I'd be very surprised if anybody is sitting around consciously thinking that women are less capable of doing a good job in management than men. But you end up with some disturbing trends in aggregate. Meaning well really is not enough, and as I said my expectation is that we'll get a few cycles of trying to be more balanced but we won't get institutional change that would inhibit backsliding. > ... and while we're on that topic, what are you doing to help? That is truly an unfortunate line of argument, and I hope you don't use it very often. Melinda
Re: IETF Diversity
On 6/19/13 10:03 AM, Doug Barton wrote: > Short version, if everyone does what they can to encourage diverse > participation, we won't need "legislation" to fix the problem. I'd like it if that were true but I don't think it is. For example, the majority of academic librarians are women (one demographic survey I saw said 80%) but the majority of academic library directors are men (again, ~80%). I'd like to think that good intentions and happy thoughts will provide a durable solution to the problem but I'm not convinced. I am convinced, however, that because of our decision-making processes we would not be able to do "legislation," in any event. Melinda
Re: IETF Diversity
On 6/19/13 8:12 AM, Peter Saint-Andre wrote: > On 6/19/13 10:00 AM, Melinda Shore wrote: >> On 6/19/13 7:56 AM, Peter Saint-Andre wrote: >>> Why do you believe that my opinions are unexamined? I have been >>> thinking and reading about social, cultural, and personal change >>> for a very long time. >> >> You made an assertion that's at least a little ahistorical, > > That depends on which historians you've been reading. Peter, it's a fact in the US and Canada that court cases preceded civil rights protections which preceded social change. This has been true for racial minorities, women, glbt folk, etc. I expect that there are historians who'd argue otherwise but allow me to suggest that if so they are very, very far out of the mainstream. It seems to me that without some sort of institutional change it's likely that for a few cycles nomcoms will try to be "sensitive" to the question of the underrepresentation of women and then it will be back to business as usual, because that's the way these things go. It's unusual for people to voluntarily surrender their privilege. Melinda
Re: IETF Diversity
On 6/19/13 7:56 AM, Peter Saint-Andre wrote: > Why do you believe that my opinions are unexamined? I have been > thinking and reading about social, cultural, and personal change for a > very long time. You made an assertion that's at least a little ahistorical, you used it to support an argument against organizational change, and when I disagreed you went to the "Let's not talk about it" place. Melinda
Re: IETF Diversity
On 6/19/13 7:26 AM, Peter Saint-Andre wrote: > On 6/19/13 9:22 AM, Melinda Shore wrote: >> Don't know about that one. In the US, at least, legal mandates >> have typically led social change, at least when it comes to civil >> rights, etc. > That's a topic for the ietf-philosophy discussion list, methinks. :-) To the extent that unexamined assertions about how social/cultural change works are being used to explain why the organization doesn't need to be particularly proactive, I don't think so. Melinda
Re: IETF Diversity
On 6/19/13 7:16 AM, Peter Saint-Andre wrote: > Actually I see lots of structural problems -- I just happen to be of the > mindset that working from the bottom up is the only sustainable model > for change. Don't know about that one. In the US, at least, legal mandates have typically led social change, at least when it comes to civil rights, etc. Melinda
Re: New non-WG malign list : Network Service Chaining (NSC)
How about a new non-malign WG list? Melinda
Re: [IETF] Content-free Last Call comments
On 6/12/13 3:17 AM, Romascanu, Dan (Dan) wrote: > Hi, > > I agree with Warren and disagree with Pete on this issue. > > Of course, adding more arguments, being more verbose when expressing > support is very useful. However, I consider the brief comments like > the one made by Russ useful - at least in determining consensus. I am > actually encouraging such comments in the WGs I chair. I would like > to add an argument, irrespective of who made the comment (which also > counts IMO). Assuming a LC of some sorts (IETFLC, WGLC) gets only two > negative comments. Would it not be useful to know that it's (2 > (negative) vs. 0 (positive)) or (2 (negative) vs. 10 (positive))? > Indeed, we do not count votes in the IETF, but then we also have a > problem in interpreting silence, and for this purpose IMO what in > this thread is called 'content-free' actually has a lot of content on > this respect. I think Pete is correct, in that the way we do last calls tends to look like voting, which in turn suggests to participants that we're voting. "Are there any objections to ?" is, I think, the real question at hand, although I can see where that could tend to attract cranks and chronic kvetches. Perhaps something along the lines of "Does anybody have reasons this document should not progress towards publication?" might do. Melinda
Re: Content-free Last Call comments
On 6/11/13 10:02 AM, Ted Lemon wrote: > The IETF last call is for catching things the working group missed, > not for rehashing arguments that were beaten to death in the working > group. I am not sure I fully understand why we're having this conversation, or rather why this aspect of the broader discussion requires attention. Sometimes working groups make mistakes, and I don't think that in practice there'd be general objection to having serious problems identified during IETF last call. Yes, there have been cases where cranks who can't let go of an idea that was rejected try to flog it to death, but that doesn't mean that identifying and dealing with real problems should be dismissed. Melinda
Re: Content-free Last Call comments
On 6/11/13 9:52 AM, Doug Barton wrote: > The flip side of that argument is that we don't want to assume working > groups are infallible, or more importantly not subject to the groupthink > phenomenon. Otherwise what is IETF LC for? Right. We've had some issues with document quality, and I can think of several documents that sailed through WG last call and should not have. Melinda
Re: ietf@ietf.org is a failure
On 6/8/13 10:09 AM, SM wrote: > As an off-topic comment, there are are alternative ways in making a > decision; the best judgement of the most experienced or IETF Consensus. I don't think it's off-topic. Consensus (rough or otherwise) requires that at some point people can live with decisions with which they disagree. To the extent that we've seen recent misbehavior on this list, it's from only one person who's rejecting the consensus and rejecting the process. It's really annoying but I don't think it's particularly disruptive. If it becomes disruptive, there's a rarely-used hammer: the PR action. Melinda
Re: Best list for IETF last calls [was: Weekly posting summary for ietf@ietf.org]
On 6/7/13 11:52 AM, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > Rule 1 for complex and divergent mail threads is to change the > Subject header when the subject changes. If you don't do that, > your mail is rather likely to get junked. > > I think that IETF last call threads should stay on the main IETF > discussion list. That is exactly the right place for them. I tend to think so, as well. You never know when someone's going to stumble over something and make a comment that matters. The cost is that you get jackasses being loud and petty, but frankly you'd get that on a last call mailing list, anyway, since IETF last calls have in a few cases been known to function as jackass magnets. It seems to me that the real problem isn't last calls, it's people not understanding that behaving badly has a cost associated with it, and that cost is that they're alienating people they'd (apparently) like to work with and demolishing their chances of getting an editorship or moving into leadership roles. Melinda
Re: [IETF] Re: Issues in wider geographic participation
On 5/30/13 6:21 PM, l.w...@surrey.ac.uk wrote: > You'd love the Pacific. > Few IETFers get exposed to these kinds of environments. I'd had no idea. The point here isn't to derogate techies working in this kind of environment, but that because the sorts of informal technology and skills transfer mechanisms that exist in tech centers don't exist here (people stay in jobs forever, not many new people come in, there's no elite university), there's heavy reliance among operators and enterprise data centers on the people who sell them stuff. I think that this is probably more common than we realize, and might go towards answering questions about where the operators are. Melinda
Re: [IETF] Re: Issues in wider geographic participation
On 5/30/13 4:37 PM, John C Klensin wrote: > ultimately call the IETF's legitimacy and long-term future into > question. As you suggest, we may have good vendor participation > but the operators are ultimately the folks who pay the vendor's > bills. Here in Alaska was the first time I'd worked in an environment that had technologists at a considerably less than elite skill level, and I'd previously had no idea the extent to which average operators/data centers rely on vendors (worse: VARs and consultants) to solve their technical problems. The only time I'd seen someone from an Alaskan operator participate in anything to do with the IETF was when one person "voted" on the transitional address space allocation. I think Warren is correct to identify this as an issue with operator participation. Perhaps we should be thinking about some alternative to engaging operators by trying to get them to schlep to meetings. Something along the lines of a liaison process or creating a pipeline between us and NOGs. Melinda
Re: When to adopt a WG I-D
On 5/29/13 11:56 PM, Adrian Farrel wrote: > Yes, I'm sure. > Your turn now. > Are you sure? No, not at all. Melinda
Re: When to adopt a WG I-D
On 5/29/13 11:16 PM, Adrian Farrel wrote: > Which is why this isn't a process document. Are you sure? Melinda
Re: When to adopt a WG I-D
On 5/29/13 10:53 PM, Adrian Farrel wrote: > I see a wedge :-) > The problem is where to stop. Well, I don't know. Maybe the problem is where to start. That is to say, I don't know what problem this document is trying to solve, or if there even is a problem. I know that we've had some major document quality issues in opsawg and Benoit has provided some needed guidance on document adoption, but this doesn't seem to be dealing with that sort of issue. Is it that people are confused about when to adopt a document (or not)? Is this intended to provide some sort of context to resolve complaints? Is this a tutorial? To be honest at this point I'm sort of reflexively anti-process-documents, unless there's an actual problem that needs actual solution. Melinda
Re: What do we mean when we standardize something?
I think this is one of the best discussions of what we're about that I've seen anywhere, and I'm grateful to John for working this through. One thing I'd like to take up further is this: On 5/29/13 9:23 AM, John C Klensin wrote: > Similarly, we sometimes hear it argued that we should accept a > specification for Proposed Standard unchanged because it has > been extensively developed and reviewed elsewhere. That may be > reasonable in some cases although I'd hope we wouldn't make it > a common practice. But, if a specification adopted for > Proposed Standard on that basis is then proposed for > advancement to Internet Standard, I think the review should be > comprehensive --perhaps even more comprehensive than the usual > such review-- because the Internet Standard is unambiguously an > IETF product and recommendation not that of the other body. I'd actually much prefer to see these go to informational, if they're to be published. Otherwise I agree - if something's going to be an IETF standard it needs to go through the IETF standards development review and revision process, which is probably not what the authors want. Melinda
Re: IETF Meeting in South America
On 5/28/13 6:27 PM, Arturo Servin wrote: > Going to Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Mexico City or Santiago will always > split audiences as these are the major tech hubs in the region (also add > Bogota, Lima, San Jose and other cities). So, I think it is not > comparable with Australia. I actually don't agree with Lloyd that the reason that the Australian meeting didn't lead to increased Australian participation was that it was because it was in Adelaide. I don't expect a South American meeting in any South American city to lead to an increase in Latin American participation, either. Melinda
Re: IETF Meeting in South America
On 5/28/13 3:06 PM, l.w...@surrey.ac.uk wrote: > The centres for networking industry in Australia are Melbourne and Sydney, in > that order. > It's a bit like IETF 51 being held in Grimsby, not London or Cambridge. Okay. So, should we be extrapolating from this to what we can expect from Brazilians if we meet in Buenos Aires? Melinda
Re: IETF Meeting in South America
On 5/28/13 6:20 AM, Christian O'Flaherty wrote: > Probably, this lack of social interaction in our region is one of > the main reasons for low participation. Most of latin american > IETFers are currently living outside the region and they engaged in > the IETF when living in the US or Europe. It's difficult to be > involved when no one else around is working in it or think it doesn't > fit well in their current work. A physical meeting will help to > "demystify" the IETF, making it "accesible" from a professional > perspective. Any sense of why that didn't happen with Australians after the Adelaide meeting? I'm not opposed to meeting in South America but there have been an awful lot of assertions about this or that happening if we do, without a lot of supporting evidence. History, unfortunately, doesn't support many of these assertions, and I think beating the meeting location question to death is at least some small distraction from trying to get at the core issues. For whatever it's worth, I was participating on IETF mailing lists well before attending a meeting. Granted, I'm a native English speaker and wasn't dealing with that as an issue but probably more to the point was that there was work going on in the IETF that directly impacted work I was doing myself. Melinda
Re: [manet] Last Call: (Security Threats for NHDP) to Informational RFC
On 5/27/13 10:39 AM, Abdussalam Baryun wrote: > I also didn't see objection of my comments from the WG. I also didn't > see support of your reply from the WG. (WG decisions are > WG-rough-consensus, not the editors opinion). Chairs call consensus.
Re: Issues in wider geographic participation
On 5/26/13 9:52 PM, John Levine wrote: > I have to say that I don't see one or two meetings in South America > addressing any of these. I don't, either. However, > Given that the incremental cost to the > participants, compared to meeting in North America, would likely be on > the order of a million dollars, it seems to me very likely that there > are better ways to spend the money. It also seems unlikely to me that that million dollars is otherwise available. I like the idea of setting up a remote participation center (doubly- so if one or more very experienced IETFers who spoke the local language could be on-site) but it seems very unlikely to me that, say, a Frobnitz Networks employee would be able to convinced Frobnitz Networks to send the $400 saved by not going to Buenos Aires to such an undertaking. Melinda
Re: More participation from under-represented regions
On 5/26/13 12:08 PM, SM wrote: > The elephant in the > room is that there hasn't been any discussion about what has been done > to get more participation from under-represented regions but nobody has > mentioned that. One of the things that's really popped out in the discussion on the ericas list is that none of the people posting have been from vendors/manufacturers, which right now is by far the largest sector participating in the IETF. The posters have either been academics or from operators. We can't even get much participation from operators in North America and Europe. The industry sector bias in IETF participation is possibly compounding the regional bias. Melinda
Re: IETF Meeting in South America
On 5/24/13 9:31 AM, Ted Lemon wrote: > You are not. Although Vancouver seems to have taken over for Minneapolis. Feh. There is no winter in Vancouver. On the other hand there are salmon and steelhead. Melinda
Re: IETF Meeting in South America
On 5/24/13 8:07 AM, Lou Berger wrote: > I personally am a big fan for going to uninteresting locations in their > off season. Although, perhaps I'm alone in liking Minneapolis in the > winter as an IETF destination... No, not alone. At any rate I think that the core questions about participation are probably more relevant than a run-down of individual travel costs. I've noticed that some of the posters from South American countries who've expressed enthusiasm for an IETF meeting in Buenos Aires have not been working group contributors, and I'm wondering what they feel the barriers to participation have been, and what can be done that would make it more likely that they'd, say, review documents. Melinda
Re: IETF Meeting in South America
On 5/23/13 6:37 PM, Juliao Braga wrote: > Maybe they can not submit drafts, but can > contribute to foster the knowledge of those who produce drafts or > working as reviewers. Anyone can submit a draft and anyone can review a draft. The barrier to that sort of participation is extremely low. So the question is why we aren't seeing more drafts, reviews, and discussions from people in Central and South America, and what we can do as an organization to change that. I have no problem with meeting in Buenos Aires but I do not have reason to think that having a meeting there will do anything to increase active participation from that region. Melinda
Re: IETF Meeting in South America
On 5/23/13 5:34 PM, Juliao Braga wrote: > Currently there are three. How many? To twelve meetings per year, for > example! Sounds like a sure-fire way to shift the participation from skewing towards working engineers to skewing towards professional standardizers. How can we encourage people from underrepresented areas to 1) submit internet drafts, 2) review working group drafts, and 3) participate in mailing list discussions? Melinda
Re: IETF Meeting in South America
On 5/23/13 10:30 AM, Alia Atlas wrote: > Never been to Buenos Aires - but it sounds like a great idea. I'm skeptical that it will change much - it seems likely to me that we'll get a bunch of one-time attendees and that we'll be doing really well to get one new person who becomes a continuing participant. That said, I do think it will be *extremely* valuable to get feedback from those one-time attendees about what they're seeing in our documents, and that we should be trying to figure out ahead of time how to engage those one-time attendees. Traveling from Fairbanks, pretty much anywhere is a long, long trip and quite expensive relative to what most people pay for airfare, so actual location doesn't make that much of a difference to me personally. I also don't think it's that big a deal if a few regulars miss one meeting because it's too far or too costly or whatever. So as I said, I'm skeptical, but I think the potential benefits of giving this a shot outweigh the likely downsides. Melinda
Re: IETF Diversity Question on Berlin Registration?
On 4/29/13 1:11 AM, Stewart Bryant wrote: > The other thing to remember is that whilst your proportional estimates > are likely to be correct, in a random process you will get long runs of > "bias" that only average out in the long run. Right, although if "normal" statistical fluctuation gives us a long period of woman-free leadership, somewhere in your long run we might expect the same statistical fluctuation to deliver unto us a stretch in which women are overrepresented in the leadership. Melinda
Re: Meritocracy, diversity, and leaning on the people you know
On 4/20/13 6:12 AM, Hector Santos wrote: > There is much more that can be done, but we are still holding on to a > version of the past that is keeping the IETF behind. Behind what? Melinda
Re: IETF Diversity Question on Berlin Registration?
On 4/13/13 4:09 AM, Lou Berger wrote: > Do you disagree, are you saying that the IETF should only/first try > to address only gender bias? Clearly not, Lou. For one thing, I've repeatedly said that we're underperforming on a number of axes - repeatedly, and for another I've said some number of times that I don't think that we can do anything about gender bias and that the costs of addressing it given our decision-making structures combined with the very vocal opposition to even looking at the question, let alone addressing it. Experience suggests that gender bias is one of the most deeply-rooted, difficult- to-deal-with bias problems. The IETF punts on a large number of hard technical problems and it would not be inconsistent to punt on a hard social problem. So no, I'm not saying that at all, Lou. I thought I was pretty clear about that. Melinda
Re: IETF Diversity Question on Berlin Registration?
On 4/12/13 1:26 PM, Lou Berger wrote: > No argument from me, I'm just asking that a comment/position/question > that I don't understand be substantiated. And I'm telling you that I think the numbers are highly suggestive of bias. We can take a swing at getting a very rough handle on that but I'm actually not sure that we should because it appears to be the case that the cost of any remediation that some of us might want to undertake would be higher than the cost of living with bias in the system (this would be the considerable downside to consensus decision-making processes with a very large participant base). >> And I don't know if you intended to or not, but what you >> communicated is "The best candidates are nearly always >> western white guys," since that's who's being selected. >> That's a problematic suggestion. > > I certainly, in no way, shape, or form intended such an implication. I > have not idea how one could read it that way, [ ... ] A (male) friend once said that men are no more likely to notice sexism than fish are to notice water. I think that was far too broad but generally true. If I think that white western men are being selected in disproportion to their presence in the candidate pool, and I do, then telling me that "we only choose the best" is telling me that white, western men tend to be the best. Pretty much every organization that applauds itself for its meritocratic reward structure (to the extent that an I* gig is a "reward") and yet only advances white guys says the same thing. It is a trope, and a familiar one. Melinda
Re: Purpose of IESG Review
On 4/12/2013 11:28 AM, Arturo Servin wrote: > But if a single individual of the IESG can technically challenge and > change the work of a whole WG and the IETF, then we have something wrong > in our process because that means that the document had a serious > problem and we didn't spot it in the process or an IESG member is using > its power to change a document according to its personal beliefs. We've had that happen in a working group I chair and I do think that it was the result of process failure in the working group. That said, there seemed to be broad agreement across the IESG that the document had certain specific flaws - I do think there's a problem if a single IESG member can reject working group consensus and hold up a document - it seems as if there should be wider agreement that the document is too flawed to progress. Melinda
Re: IETF Diversity Question on Berlin Registration?
On 4/12/2013 11:04 AM, Lou Berger wrote: > While I've been very reluctant to jump on this topic, I have to ask > what's the basis for this assertion? I think the numbers are pretty compelling, which is why I think they would deserve scrutiny if there's the possibility of remediation if a problem is identified. However, it's pretty clear from the tone of the discussion so far that no remediation would be possible, and so I actually think it's probably a bad idea to attack the question. That does not mean, however, that the question does not exist. And I don't know if you intended to or not, but what you communicated is "The best candidates are nearly always western white guys," since that's who's being selected. That's a problematic suggestion. Melinda
Re: IETF Diversity Question on Berlin Registration?
On 4/12/2013 10:12 AM, Toerless Eckert wrote: > I still think that the IETF community at large has no intentional > diversity bias, so the process of discussing and analyzing > diversity in the context of leadership is to help better describe > diversity induced job qualifications as well as uncovering any > potential unconscious bias to help overcoming it. I think it's unintentional, as well, but I'm not sure that's *much* of an improvement over malicious bias. It certainly makes it far, far, far more difficult to address. As I said I think that looking at the pool of nominees who've accepted their nominations and comparing it to the pool of people selected would provide one very rough measure of bias (explicit or otherwise) in one stage of the process. Melinda
Re: IETF Diversity Question on Berlin Registration?
On 4/11/2013 1:38 PM, Toerless Eckert wrote: > Suggesting that simply diversity stats across all IETF participants can help > to deduce anything about leadership diversity bias is ignoring qualification > and availability of candidates. Thats why i proposed the questions i would > like to see > in a questionaire. You don't really need a questionnaire to go to that. Nominations are a crude metric but they're a metric nevertheless, and it would be an interesting exercise to see how the pool of people recommended represents (or not) the overall pool of people who've accepted their nominations. However. The question that would answer (approximately) is whether or not there's bias in the nomcom process. My own feeling is that if we were to find that the numbers supported the notion that there's bias present in the system we probably couldn't do anything about it without tearing the organization apart, so, we live with bias, and trying to identify whether or not there's bias in the nomcom process would be something along the general lines of opening the gates of hell and we'd probably be better off not knowing for sure. But I digress. It seems to me that it might be more useful to identify what it is you're trying to find out, first, and in this case I'm really not sure why Ray asked that particular question. Melinda
Re: IETF Diversity Question on Berlin Registration?
On 4/11/2013 8:00 AM, Toerless Eckert wrote: > The first three question could allow based on self assessment to evaluate > whether > IETF leadership is biased based on diversity stats or not. There are actually several questions in there. It would be interesting to know how the pool of people willing to serve in a leadership role relate to the pool of participants. It would also be interesting to know how the pool of people recommended by the nomcom relate to the pool of candidates who've accepted nominations. Those are two very different questions but I think they're both good ones. Melinda
Re: Proposed solution for DPEP (Diversity Problem Entry Point) - IETF April 1 jokes.
I am absolutely not suggesting changing anything other than the unfortunate attitude that the right response to someone missing the joke is to read them out of the meeting/declare them anathema or unworthy or not members of this community. Your beef isn't with me, it's with Måns. Melinda
Re: Proposed solution for DPEP (Diversity Problem Entry Point) - IETF April 1 jokes.
Well, the timing of this strikes me as one of those "oh" moments, following as quickly on the heels of the diversity discussion. Not so much because of language and culture issues (although those are unavoidable) but because it strikes me as kind of unhealthy to use the April Fool RFCs as a tool to partition the audience into "us" and "them".
Re: Proposed solution for DPEP (Diversity Problem Entry Point) - IETF April 1 jokes.
Doesn't it strike you as odd that this discussion has moved towards some sort of tacit/accepted acknowledgment of the role of joke RFCs as insider/outsider cultural markers rather than just clever bits of writing that are widely enjoyed? I'm a little surprised to find myself developing sympathy for tiresome humorless whiny people. (Wait, no I'm not). Anyway this strikes me as an unfortunate use of those documents. Melinda
Re: Comments for Humorous RFCs or uncategorised RFCs or dated April the first
On 4/6/13 1:33 PM, Ulrich Herberg wrote: > Indeed. The wikipedia entry is somewhat misleading though: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_RFC Fix it or ignore it. Wikipedia is neither authoritative nor reliable. Melinda
Re: Comments for Humorous RFCs or uncategorised RFCs or dated April the first
On 4/6/13 9:35 AM, Abdussalam Baryun wrote: > but just like to comment about any faulty RFC because it is in > the end a Request For Comment (RFC). Clearly the real solution would be to rename the series. Melinda
Re: Appointment of Scott Mansfield as new IETF Liaison Manager to the ITU-T
On 3/28/13 5:13 AM, Stewart Bryant wrote: > Therefore it > seems unlikely that there would be any candidate that the IAB > did not already know about. So whilst I agree in general, > this is not a case that should raise any concerns. Wow. Allow me to suggest that even if you think this is true, going through an open, transparent process will provide an answer to questions about insiderism and would be in the best interest of the organization from a process point of view. Melinda
Re: On the tradition of I-D "Acknowledgements" sections
On 3/25/13 8:17 AM, Scott Brim wrote: > or a statement that acknowledgments is not a required section and not > subject to IETF guidance. Excellent. Melinda
Re: On the tradition of I-D "Acknowledgements" sections
On 3/24/13 10:28 PM, Abdussalam Baryun wrote: > Some people never recognise new comers ideas until backed up with old > comer idea. Do you think that is right? No, I think that is not right. I brought middlebox work to the IETF as my initial involvement. It did not go smoothly, but it went, and we ended up chartering a new working group. I think you'll find many similar stories. It can be extremely frustrating bringing new work in, whether you're a newcomer or an old-timer. I've got some stuff I'm working on now that I'm having considerable difficulty finding traction with but the solution to that is not to whine to the IETF discussion list, but to improve the presentation and framework, and make it clear that the problem is well-defined and soluble. (It's extremely difficult to move middlebox-related work forward in the IETF - on balance that's a good thing, given the seriousness of the potential impacts). You get what you get, and you have to work with what you have. If you have defensible ideas it can work out quite well. If you have indefensible ideas, well, here you are. Melinda
Re: On the tradition of I-D "Acknowledgements" sections
On 3/24/13 10:02 PM, Abdussalam Baryun wrote: > I like what we have so far, but are those connected > processes/information reflected into the produced document? Why > ignoring names of volunteers? I suggest to fix this, My experience over lo, these many years is that the best way to ensure that you're recognized is to produce text/suggestions/ideas that other people find valuable. Melinda
Re: On the tradition of I-D "Acknowledgements" sections
On 3/24/13 4:55 PM, Abdussalam Baryun wrote: > In this way we have connections between inputs otherwise the IETF > system has no connection between its important information. We have the mailing list archives, we've got the document shepherd writeups, we've got the IESG evaluation record, we've got the IESG writeups, we've got meeting minutes, we've got jabber session archives, we've got audio recordings of meetings, and we've got the document history. Melinda
Re: On the tradition of I-D "Acknowledgements" sections
On 3/24/13 4:55 PM, Abdussalam Baryun wrote: > In this way we have connections between inputs otherwise the IETF > system has no connection between its important information. We have the mailing list archives, we've got the document shepherd writeups, we've got the IESG evaluation record, we've got the IESG writeups, we've got meeting minutes, we've got jabber session archives, we've got audio recordings of meetings, and we've got the document history. Melinda
Re: Less Corporate Diversity
On 3/22/13 6:28 PM, Stephen Farrell wrote: > FWIW, seems to me you're describing one leg of the elephant > each. From my experience I'd say you both actually have an > appreciation of the overall elephant but that's not coming > out in this kind of thread. Well, maybe, but it seems to me that he's lost track of the discussion. My argument is that the IESG has a gatekeeping function in taking on new work, that's based (aside from resourcing) on a set of values, their view of what's needed in the industry, etc. With a uniform IESG membership you're not going to get a rather uniform view of the overall context for IETF work, you'll lose perspective, and consequently there's value to having members who aren't almost all from big manufacturers. I'm not sure what Martin's point is, to be honest. Melinda
Re: Less Corporate Diversity
On 3/22/13 6:17 PM, Martin Rex wrote: > Before allowing a new WG to start, ADs seem to make an assessment > of whether there are sufficient volunteers of both kinds to do the > work, whether there is sufficient expertise in the IETF to perform > adequate review of the results and whether there is sufficient > momentum in the effort (sufficiently large interest group, > sufficiently strong desire) so that there is actually going to > be results. The value of the work, the likelihood of success, perceived need in the industry, and "correctness" are assessed. Sorry, Martin, but you're not describing how the IETF actually works. Melinda
