Subject: RE: Voting (again)

From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2005 08:48:17 -0400 (EDT)

> From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>

    > Because they only get to do it once and have no expectation of
    > repeating.

One would think that would make them more likely to make changes, not less.

    >> The *whole point* of the NomComm is for it to have roughly the same
    >> views as the IETF as a whole, except in a smaller body.

    > The people whoe wrote the constitution certainly thought that there
    > would be a difference. Otherwise they would have done it the obvious
    > way.

You clearly are not paying attention to the words "smaller body", with
the manifold advantages that brings.

    > As I said, ignoring the 2,500 years of experience since that date.
    > Moreover the Athenian constitution was not exactly a success, they
    > murdered Socrates, got whacked in the Peleponesian war and finaly got
    > whacked by the Romans.
    > Given the fragmentary nature of classical accounts I find it
    > astonishing that you would think that you could understand the dynamics
    > of the organizations at all, let alone whether they were satisfactory.
    > Most of the accounts were written by the people whose interests were
    > served by those arrangements. The one dissenting voice, Plato provides
    > a critique so devastating that the same experiment is not tried again
    > for two millenia.

Alas, much as pointing out the numerous errors above would interest me, it's
a bit far afield for this list. (I'm particularly amused by your calling on
Plato for support - he was profoundly anti-democratic.)

Let me stay somewhat on topic by pointing out that the US Founding Fathers
found the systems of the Greeks (and Romans) worthy of study and inspiration
- so there's at least one group of relatively modern political geniuses who
disagree with your valuation.

	Noel

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From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2005 15:58:02 +0200

This discussion shows at least that we should try to build on experience 
and produce an RFC on the way an intergovernance works. The Internet, and 
the e-society has changed a lot since the inception of the NIC and IETF 
(this is what I pointed in referring to Doug Engelbart). Noel can call 
"smaller body" what he called "boostraps". I think what has changed is them 
to be not only central, but trying to be exclusive, like in a centralised 
network, to protect their survival when confronted to decentralisation. And 
becoming sometime aggressive when facing a distributed problematic.

With the NIC, Doug provided the first container for the RFC content (please 
[re]read RFC 82). IETF then came and shared in the content building lead by 
Steve Crocker's individual/bootstrap documents. I am not sure all this 
still matches the global evolution of the network and its today distributed 
nature. What Phillip seems to document is the difficulty to adapt to the 
today's demand without some independence, some coopetitivity. Instead of a 
hierarchical structure for the IETF, inherited from a central NIC and a 
central IAB with its central IESG, and its unique Truth and its Appeal 
system, could it not be interesting to have coopetition between various 
Technical Interest Groups proposing possibly different models and 
solutions, making practice decide, or dialoguing together when they find a 
way to converge?

I work on distributed Context Reference Centers. They cannot depend on a 
single culture since they document cultures, yet they should be 
interoperable. There may not be a single root file (cf. ICANN ICP-3), but 
we advisably need a single structured root matrix. We need the same kind of 
hyperlink approach/support. XML is may be a good way to build and negotiate 
common infos, but it is not a good vector for sharing them (all the more in 
different scripts and languages). We do not want a fragmentation, but we do 
not want either (a) rigid domination (-s, as actually there is a "not much 
innovative culture" but many different camarilla).

IMHO a technical and R&D intergovernance where various independently 
governed visions can work and mutually benefit from each others, should be 
the adequate solution. This is actually what we do today, but not 
documented. DNS, NAT, VoIP, GRID, P2P, ML.ML... where not invented in using 
the Internet standard process. I know that the American langage makes no 
difference between federating and confederating. This may be one of the 
problem of IETF. For those who make a difference, I submit that the IETF 
and the Internet standard process suffer from federalism, and would bluntly 
develop from confederalism, leading to a stable broader variety of 
compatible, awaited and innovative deliveries.

My 2 euro cents.
jfc

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2005 17:17:20 +0200

JFC (Jefsey) Morfin wrote:
...
> I submit that the IETF and the Internet standard process suffer from federalism, and would bluntly develop from confederalism,

Both the American federation and the Swiss confederation leave certain matters
to the (con)federal government: especially foreign relations (liaisons in our case)
and inter-state commerce (cross-Area review).

    Brian

---

From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2005 22:14:31 +0200

At 17:17 20/04/2005, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>>I submit that the IETF and the Internet standard process suffer from 
>>federalism, and would bluntly develop from confederalism,
>

Obviously this depends on countries and times. The real difference is that 
the daily sovereignty is with the Federation or with the States of the 
Confederation. For example, at the UN or ITU the USA have one vote, the 
Members of Europe one each. This translates into simple daily issues: in 
the USA the FBI has a Federation-wide jurisdiction (priority?), this would 
be the same in a Federal Europe. In a confederal Europe (as today) there is 
no FBI but a coordination of the polices at top level, etc.

A confederal approach calls for architectural issues to be clearly 
documented and agreed, and a quasi total autonomy of the confedered 
entities. What means more mutual control. There is no hierarchy but 
subsidiarity. For the IETF it would mean a documented Internet 
architectural model serving as clear communications/information support 
framework, a far more important autonomy but also a far more developed 
dialog between WGs. A confederal approach would give far more 
responsibilities to WGs, but also more exposure to their members. What 
would probably be more motivating should a better press coverage be 
organized. But it would also permit different solutions to be pursued in 
parallel. This coopetition could better foster innovation. IESG and IAB 
would be considered as services to the WG. I know that this kind of 
concerted relations has no term to describe it in English (French 
"concertation") and has been imposed in "Eurospeak".

Dictionary.com:
concertation: \Con`cer*ta"tion\, n. [L. concertatio.] Strife; contention. 
[Obs.] --Bailey.
French
to concert how to independently act in synergy
jfc