Subject: RE: Voting (again)

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2005 16:16:10 -0700

> Why do you think a decent-sized, randomly-selected subset of 
> the IETF (i.e. the NomComm) are taking actions that are 
> substantially more conservative (in terms of keeping people) 
> than the IETF as a whole would do? 

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

> 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. So what makes you think 
> that were the IETF as a whole making the decisions, they'd be 
> any different?

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

>     > Why do engineers believe that they are experts in innovating
>     > organizations? Is the result an improvement over traditional
>     > arrangements that have been incrementally improved over 
> centuries?
> 
> I find this comment particularly hilarious, in view of the 
> fact that an important part of the inspiration for the whole 
> NomComm process was the Athenian Constitution of 508 BC; in 
> particular, the mechanism for the selection of the Boule (the 
> Council of Five Hundred), which was the chief executive organ 
> of the state.

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.

> As you will perhaps recall, this constitution was in itself 
> the result of several hundred years of tinkering with 
> democratic systems for use in small societies with direct 
> democracies (i.e. a very different environment from today's 
> mass representative democracies, with their millions of members).

The only large scale organization I know of that has anything similar is
the Socialist Workers Party - and for similar reasons, it allows the
politburo to keep talking about decentralization and grass roots power
while keeping power firmly concentrated in the hands of an elite.

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

---

From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2005 02:11:52 +0200

Dear Phillip,
I suggest you consult http://bootstrap.org. I think you will have a clearer 
picture of an underlaying culture of the IETF system. There is some work to 
do to fully evaluate that thinking, its cons and pros. Where it leads. What 
it implies.This is quite interesting. May be as much as the Plato's paradigm.

Doug Engelbart located node nr2 (first was Larry Roberts'). He created the 
NIC and if I am correct hired Steve Crocker and Jon Postel (if people here 
can confirm? I try to rebuild the links and dates. The history of the 
thinking/doctrine is very interesting to understand the design). You will 
see that in his story, he came to McDonnell Douglas where "seing no 
commercial value in his work, the company's executive fired him and his 
staff, and closed down his laboratory". I may be one of the first there who 
believed in the potentialities of his technology at McDD but  found his 
concepts did not commercialy fly because of the underlaying faith in 
"collective IQ augmentation" and activity A, B, C you may also think 
present in IETF. IMHO the world is not built that way.

Obviously time has flown. Many other contradictory influences were added. 
But for having related, studied and finaly technically/commercialy opposed 
in part these ideas, I am probably more sensible to them. I feel they found 
the IETF, IAB, IESG, ICANN, etc.
jfc

---

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2005 03:09:51 +0200

Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:

> The only large scale organization I know of that has anything
> similar is the Socialist Workers Party - and for similar
> reasons, it allows the politburo to keep talking about
> decentralization and grass roots power while keeping power
> firmly concentrated in the hands of an elite.

This thread slowly drifts off topic, but while you're at it let
me add Franco's Spain, the Vatican, and Zimbabwe.  So far I'm
happy with the chairs and an A-D I've seen elsewhere, and I was
also happy in MARID until they closed it against the rules.  

To fix this all that has to be done is to declare RfC 3710 4.3
as incompatible with RfC 2418 4, and scrap the former.  Bye.

---

From: Steve Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2005 21:40:57 -0400

I'm not sure where these history questions come from.  The initial 
sequence for the Arpanet is documented pretty thoroughly.  The first 
four nodes were UCLA(1), SRI(2), UCSB(3) and Utah(4).  They were 
installed approximately one month apart starting Sept 1, 1969.  (The 
exact installation dates may have varied slightly.)

Doug Engelbart ran the lab at SRI. Vint, Jon and I were all at UCLA 
working in Len Kleinrock's lab.  Larry Roberts was the director of the 
Information Processing Techniques Office at ARPA.  He was the sponsor of 
the network, which means he paid for it and oversaw the contracts.  BBN 
built the IMPs, which was their name for what we would now call routers.

Over the next few years we all moved around.  I went to ARPA.  Vint went 
to Stanford University.  Jon went to work at MITRE in the Washington DC 
area and then moved back to California to work for Engelbart at SRI.  I 
finished at ARPA -- by then renamed to DARPA -- and went to USC-ISI. 
Jon left SRI and came down to USC-ISI in a different group and stayed 
there until he passed away.  Vint left Stanford and came to DARPA.  Etc.

Steve

JFC (Jefsey) Morfin wrote:
> Dear Phillip,
> I suggest you consult http://bootstrap.org <http://bootstrap.org/>. I 
> think you will have a clearer picture of an underlaying culture of the 
> IETF system. There is some work to do to fully evaluate that thinking, 
> its cons and pros. Where it leads. What it implies.This is quite 
> interesting. May be as much as the Plato's paradigm.
> 
> Doug Engelbart located node nr2 (first was Larry Roberts'). He created 
> the NIC and if I am correct hired Steve Crocker and Jon Postel (if 
> people here can confirm? I try to rebuild the links and dates. The 
> history of the thinking/doctrine is very interesting to understand the 
> design). You will see that in his story, he came to McDonnell Douglas 
> where "seing no commercial value in his work, the company's executive 
> fired him and his staff, and closed down his laboratory". I may be one 
> of the first there who believed in the potentialities of his technology 
> at McDD but  found his concepts did not commercialy fly because of the 
> underlaying faith in "collective IQ augmentation" and activity A, B, C 
> you may also think present in IETF. IMHO the world is not built that way.
> 
> Obviously time has flown. Many other contradictory influences were 
> added. But for having related, studied and finaly 
> technically/commercialy opposed in part these ideas, I am probably more 
> sensible to them. I feel they found the IETF, IAB, IESG, ICANN, etc.
> jfc
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>

---

From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2005 13:06:36 +0200

On 03:40 18/04/2005, Steve Crocker said:
>sequence for the Arpanet is documented pretty thoroughly.  The first four 
>nodes were UCLA(1), SRI(2), UCSB(3) and Utah(4).  They were installed 
>approximately one month apart starting Sept 1, 1969.  (The exact 
>installation dates may have varied slightly.)
>
>finished at ARPA -- by then renamed to DARPA -- and went to USC-ISI. Jon 
>left SRI and came down to USC-ISI in a different group and stayed there 
>until he passed away.  Vint left Stanford and came to DARPA.  Etc.

Dear Steven
I understand "[Doug] also saw NLS as a natural to support an online 
directory of resources, so he proposed a Network Information Center (NIC), 
which he built up and directed until around 1977, when it spun off as an 
independent operation." 
http://www.thocp.net/biographies/engelbart_douglas.html . I am interested 
in the evolution of the thinking and experience IRT network 
intergovernance, functions and architecture. History is the only source we 
have to understand the possible alternatives, why a solution works, etc. 
For example, I am interested in the funding motivations. You described 
yours as the dream "of very high quality intercomputer connections and very 
rich protocols to knit the computers together", while Doug's NIC ad-hoc 
role decribed in RFC 082 is of great interest, as are its various possible 
architectures. Also the difference with the other international public 
deployments, which were usage or operators oriented. Considering and 
building on all these experiences together, and their implications, could 
probably address some of the concerns of Phillip.
jfc