Subject: Re: Voting Idea? (Was: Last Call: 'Requirements for IETF DraftSubmission Toolset' to Informational RFC)

From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 08 Apr 2005 01:49:22 +0200

On 14:48 07/04/2005, Jeroen Massar said:
>In short..... if you don't have a lot of financial backing one is not
>getting anywhere in an organization that is supposed to based on
>individuals, whom are supposed to be doing work on free open internet
>standards, but are unable to do so over that internet they are making
>those standards for...
>
>Just my two cents ;)

You are absolutely right. If you only have two cents and your work ... 
Actually there is not only financial backing to consider but corporate, 
cultural, language, time, etc. This was no problem as long as the IETF wasi 
the technical forum for consensus uncovering for the Academic ASCII 
Internet (you will note that corporates are vendors). What is worrying is 
that the IETF mainly lacks participation of users: application developpers, 
states, of non-American languages communities and cultures (I do not speak 
of some individuals), of business and of private users.

This problem is partly addressed by the consensus rule. It normally means 
that if one objects with seriousness he blocks the decision. The humming 
and rough consensus are on the long range obviously creeping from a "no-no" 
to a "yes-enough" system. I have nothing against or for it, I just observe 
that this system will most probably be unable to deliver responses to the 
non-IETF dominant usership - while it increasingly represents (deployment 
of the internet, US-nexusitation of the IETF) the broad majority of the 
Internet users.

This translates into the WSIS. This also technically translates in the real 
life technology (because the non-IETF people also are designers, 
developpers and vendors, or operators and states with money). DNS, VoIP, 
NAT, P2P, GRID, MP3, etc. have not been invented and made operational by 
the IETF. The network is something alive, so this creates a real problem of 
divergence. While the digital world converges, the IETF "dominance" seems 
to diverge: IPv6/NAT, IDN/ML.ML , langtags and comming DNS/PAD, mixed 
attitude towards ITU, WSIS, States.

Scott said:
 > > But we *often* take straw polls in f2f meetings,
 > but we do not count hands - we look to see if there is a clear 
difference between hands one way and or the other

IMHO here is the basic flaw. One serious hand is enough to block a 
decision. The role of the IESG should not to be to count hands, but to 
uunderstand if the opposing (even single) hand is qualified to represent a 
need and if it represents it adequately. Then to seek IAB to find a way to 
address that opposition while preserving the agreement of others.

I keep saying this to @large, but I think it is correct everywhere: "I do 
not ask my telephone to be democratic, I ask it to work". Millions can 
agree the software code is good, the one who says that the battery is 
missing is the one users will considered.

jfc

>Greets,
>  Jeroen
>
>
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