Subject: RE: I'm not the microphone police, but ...

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2005 17:55:16 -0700

There are cases where it is useful for a group to be able to take notice
of first hand experience that comes from employment.

For example I am currently reading a somewhat sureal thread in which an
individual who clearly has no experience or understanding of running
network operations for a large ISP (million plus customers) is lecturing
folk on the lack of scalability of a protocol proposed by and already
deployed by several ISPs of that type of scale.

Another issue that frequently comes up is that people will assert that a
proposal to make a new use of DNS will increase load on the system and
thus risk bringing down core DNS and thus the Internet. Except in cases
where the protocol is catastrophically bad and unnecessarily wasteful of
resources these dire predictions have never yet proved true, nor are
they likely to - most load on the core DNS is due to attacks and baddly
configured DNS systems. Even if the load on the core DNS were to
increase the point of the infrastructure is to serve the needs of users,
not the other way around.

The point I am trying to make here is that we are not dealing with a
domain that is entirely academic theory. There are cases where
operational experience is significant and affiliation can carry
significance.

If I hear several major infrastructure providers say that they have
examined a proposal and the resource requirements do not cause them
concern as far as their operations go I think it is reasonable to give
such a statement considerable weight unless there are very good reasons
to think otherwise.

Likewise I would take a concern raised by several major infrastructure
providers that a proposal did have unacceptable resource requirements
very seriously, although I would want to see some documentation and
explanation of the claim.

We do not need to give a veto to major infrastructure providers but
there has to be a mechanism that allows companies to raise issues on the
record from time to time when they choose. If only to avoid the need to
argue at interminable length why a 'scalability issue' is nothing of the
sort.

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

---

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2005 09:11:26 +0200

Hi, Philip,

Our mileages probably vary ("welcome to the IETF, variable mileage is 
how we know we're here!"), but ...

In the working group chair training, we point out that the most 
important thing working group chairs do, and the only responsibility 
they can't delegate, is declaration of working group consensus.

Call me a dreamer, but if there's one voice (which may or may not be 
from another planet) in a working group, the chair's responsibility is 
to decide if this is one of the hopefully rare cases where one voice 
SHOULD derail apparent consensus, and if it's not - to say so!

I understand the apparent advantage of saying, "well, if X says it's a 
good idea, X is from a large ISP, so they are probably right", but 
this doesn't prevent the second-order problem that large companies 
(ISPs or not) have a range of employee IQs, and if you defer to one of 
the low-order IQs because they work for Y, you may STILL end up in a 
bad place. I've seen this bad place personally.

I would hope that we evaluate ideas based on the message in most 
cases, and not on the messenger. If that's not what we do in most 
cases, I THINK this is a pretty fundamental change in how the IETF 
works.

Spencer

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
To: "IETF General Discussion Mailing List" <[email-masked]>
Sent: Wednesday, August 03, 2005 2:55 AM
Subject: RE: I'm not the microphone police, but ...

There are cases where it is useful for a group to be able to take 
notice
of first hand experience that comes from employment.

For example I am currently reading a somewhat sureal thread in which 
an
individual who clearly has no experience or understanding of running
network operations for a large ISP (million plus customers) is 
lecturing
folk on the lack of scalability of a protocol proposed by and already
deployed by several ISPs of that type of scale.

Another issue that frequently comes up is that people will assert that 
a
proposal to make a new use of DNS will increase load on the system and
thus risk bringing down core DNS and thus the Internet. Except in 
cases
where the protocol is catastrophically bad and unnecessarily wasteful 
of
resources these dire predictions have never yet proved true, nor are
they likely to - most load on the core DNS is due to attacks and 
baddly
configured DNS systems. Even if the load on the core DNS were to
increase the point of the infrastructure is to serve the needs of 
users,
not the other way around.

If I hear several major infrastructure providers say that they have
examined a proposal and the resource requirements do not cause them
concern as far as their operations go I think it is reasonable to give
such a statement considerable weight unless there are very good 
reasons
to think otherwise.

We do not need to give a veto to major infrastructure providers but
there has to be a mechanism that allows companies to raise issues on 
the
record from time to time when they choose. If only to avoid the need 
to
argue at interminable length why a 'scalability issue' is nothing of 
the
sort.

---

From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Aug 2005 13:56:43 +0200

At 09:11 03/08/2005, Spencer Dawkins wrote:
>Hi, Philip,
>Our mileages probably vary ("welcome to the IETF, variable mileage is how 
>we know we're here!"), but ...
>In the working group chair training, we point out that the most important 
>thing working group chairs do, and the only responsibility they can't 
>delegate, is declaration of working group consensus.
>Call me a dreamer, but if there's one voice (which may or may not be from 
>another planet) in a working group, the chair's responsibility is to 
>decide if this is one of the hopefully rare cases where one voice SHOULD 
>derail apparent consensus, and if it's not - to say so!
>
>good idea, X is from a large ISP, so they are probably right", but this 
>doesn't prevent the second-order problem that large companies (ISPs or 
>not) have a range of employee IQs, and if you defer to one of the 
>low-order IQs because they work for Y, you may STILL end up in a bad 
>place. I've seen this bad place personally.
>I would hope that we evaluate ideas based on the message in most cases, 
>and not on the messenger. If that's not what we do in most cases, I THINK 
>this is a pretty fundamental change in how the IETF works.

Spencer,
the problem may also be that a WG is set-up to derail the opposition of a 
few individuals on a matter they know better. In that case the simple 
exposure of the business relations of the affinity group having proposed 
the WG shows that we may face a planet war.

IMHO your IQ point could also be considered the other way around. One of 
the problem identified by RFC 3774 is the increasing number of "standard" 
participants. I am sure large corporations would be more careful at 
sending  their high-order IQ if they known that their inputs will tagged 
with the company name. The worst thing I ever read in an IETF mail is "you 
oppose him: do you know who he is?". I think we should help the coporations 
of the authors of such mails to filter them out.

BTW an interesting debate we had over multilingualism is that every IETF 
Member should disclose his IQ. ... at least the difference between his IQ 
tested in his mother tongue and in English, or between in English and in 
his best foreign tongue.
jfc

---

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2005 14:16:49 +0200

> I am sure large corporations would be more careful at sending  their 
> high-order IQ if they known that their inputs will tagged with the 
> company name.

What a wonderful world it would be, if that were true...

I'm pretty sure that less than 0.001 percent of the management teams 
at my IETF sponsors since 1996 had any idea that I was even ATTENDING 
the IETF, and our process documents point out repeatedly that it's not 
necessary to actually attend IETF face-to-face meetings in order to 
participate in the IETF.

My current sponsor is quite clear that I am, and will be, 
participating in the IETF, but that's not true for most of the people 
I talk to on IETF mailing lists. It's quite possible to be an 
excellent document editor, and probably even a reasonable working 
group chair, with very minimal sponsor awareness. I've paid my own way 
to IETFs twice, both times as WG/BOF chairs, and I know that others 
have paid their own way many more times than I have.

If an employee doesn't fill out a travel authorization to attend the 
face to face meetings, does anyone on the management team even hear 
this tree fall?

Spencer

---

From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Aug 2005 15:55:04 +0200

At 14:16 03/08/2005, Spencer Dawkins wrote:
>I'm pretty sure that less than 0.001 percent of the management teams at my 
>IETF sponsors since 1996 had any idea that I was even ATTENDING the IETF, 
>and our process documents point out repeatedly that it's not necessary to 
>actually attend IETF face-to-face meetings in order to participate in the IETF.
>
>My current sponsor is quite clear that I am, and will be, participating in 
>the IETF, but that's not true for most of the people I talk to on IETF 
>mailing lists. It's quite possible to be an excellent document editor, and 
>probably even a reasonable working group chair, with very minimal sponsor 
>awareness. I've paid my own way to IETFs twice, both times as WG/BOF 
>chairs, and I know that others have paid their own way many more times 
>than I have.
>
>If an employee doesn't fill out a travel authorization to attend the face 
>to face meetings, does anyone on the management team even hear this tree fall?

Spencer,
I am afraid we are not on the same wavelength. We all did what you say. But 
there is a time when you set up your priority budget. Attending the IETF is 
the cost of a test server I need to oppose running tested code to people 
using the IETF against our non-profit R&D for their own profit. I would 
have no problem with their agenda, if the simple disclosing of their roots 
made  heir legitimate commercial relations known and obvious to all, 
leading the community to be less impressed by the size of their Draft and 
more attentive to its real interest, for who.

I am considering the seldom cases which counts. Where Sponsors are really 
able to use the IETF, and the IANA, as a tool to protect their own 
interests, biasing the Internet standard process. In this case the strategy 
is not managed by a sponsor but through a consortium or a de facto 
alliance. The management is informed and is in the lead. I think it is not 
often (I know directly only three cases), but it is where the real danger 
is: because the Internet architecture is not separately discussed. So, it 
may be decided for long through small committing details (I know from 
experience). This is the case where RFC 3869 describes the Internet R&D 
financing by commercial interests: controlling that small committing detail 
is of key importance before investing. Then the investment will in turn 
commit the internet to the concerned interests. In the three cases I 
refered to one is a failure, one is important but less than it could have 
been, the last one is just being carried.

In these cases you have two or three geeks/managers involving themselves, 
to show who is the boss when needed. Then you have well educated 
specialised set of people, to author Drafts, co-Chair the WG, assume 
complementary Draft preparation, manage the IANA registry, etc. Then you 
have standard Members to sustain the "consensus" (by exhaustion) and to 
erode opposition to that end. The game is not to produce the best document 
for all, but to "win" against "competition's" propositions. Leading to the 
fun of seeing an intended BCP (as a successor to an RFC also dealing with 
Internet standard process issues) to invent a standard track proposition 
forbidding existing practices and running code.

I submit that publishing the resume of all the participants and the source 
of their IETF funding would help everyone understand these cases and would 
reduce them to welcome (but probably less staffed and funded) standard 
propositions. Commercial money cannot be dealt with the same as public 
money, as non-profit money, as personal money. Or you unbalance the whole 
process.

jfc

---

From: "Tom Petch" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2005 17:20:38 +0200

----- Original Message -----
From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
To: "IETF General Discussion Mailing List" <[email-masked]>
Sent: Wednesday, August 03, 2005 2:16 PM
Subject: Re: I'm not the microphone police, but ...

> face to face meetings, does anyone on the management team even hear

My own experience of a large organisation heavily involved in networking was
that being sent to Paris or London or Japan or ... was given as a reward to
someone in the networking arena who had performed well against their objectives
for the previous year.  Prior knowledge, skill, ability to contribute were not a
consideration except insofar as they formed part of those objectives.

Of course, others could take annual leave and fund it themselves - wish I had.

Tom Petch

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 06 Aug 2005 12:00:43 +0200

I actually think IETF might function better if nobody's badge had his 
company's name on it, and nobody used a company email address.  People 
place way too much importance on someone's employer.  Yes, sometimes 
people break the rules and speak for their employers, but it's not wise 
to assume that this is the case.

As for those who want to acknowledge who pays the travel bills - It 
doesn't matter who pays the bills.  What matters is whether what's being 
said makes good technical sense.

Keith

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 06 Aug 2005 06:51:04 -0400

--On Saturday, 06 August, 2005 12:00 +0200 Keith Moore
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> I actually think IETF might function better if nobody's badge
> had his company's name on it, and nobody used a company email
> address.  People place way too much importance on someone's
> employer.  Yes, sometimes people break the rules and speak for
> their employers, but it's not wise to assume that this is the
> case.
> 
> As for those who want to acknowledge who pays the travel bills
> - It doesn't matter who pays the bills.  What matters is
> whether what's being said makes good technical sense.

Keith,

In a more perfect world, I would completely agree with you.  In
practice, there is a more subtle issue than "speaking for their
employers" which involved avoiding saying things that one's
employer would find troublesome.  In my experience in IETF and,
especially in other standards bodies, it is much more common for
a company to say to an employee "in general, we don't care what
you advocate, but you are not permitted to speak against a
position the company has taken or in favor of a position that
would hurt one of the company's product plans".

FWIW, the main US standards body in the
above-physical-infrastructure information technology area
responded, something over 30 years ago, to variations on to
problem of whether someone was participating as an individual
expert or a company representative by making people declare what
they were (with a default). Every membership roster for a
technical committee or working group would list people in a way
that would distinguish between "works for Foobar Corporation"
and "represents FooBar Corporation and reflects their views".
The strongest push for making the distinction actually came from
some of those who were obligated to represent company positions:
more than one of them commented in private that if he or she was
required to say stupid things, it was good for it to be clear
that they were someone's else's opinions.    The advantage of
that sort of approach is that no one has to lie or pretend they
are something they are not.  Everyone has to identify explicitly
what they are and under what constraints they do (or do not)
operate, and then we move on.

In or environment, without long-lived rosters and membership
lists, we could require periodic disclaimers in email messages
(e.g., "I am speaking for GreedyCorp here") or make colored
badges, or stripes, or...).

I am _not_ particularly recommending this, but it is something
we might think about as pointing the way to a better plan than
"let's pretend everyone is acting as an individual and able to
speak freely on any topic, even when we know it isn't always
true".

    john

---

From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2005 13:01:00 +0200

On 6-aug-2005, at 12:00, Keith Moore wrote:

> I actually think IETF might function better if nobody's badge had  
> his company's name on it, and nobody used a company email address.

That assumes that someone's company is irrelevant to their  
viewpoints. I don't think this is generally true in practice (depends  
on the company and the person, of course), and I don't see why it  
necessarily should be either. (If I were to send someone to the IETF  
on my dime I'd sure want them to stick up for my interests to a  
reasonable degree.)

So in the interest of full disclosure, people's affiliations should  
be easy to discover.

---

From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 06 Aug 2005 08:51:23 -0400

>to assume that this is the case.

More than once, I've seen ostensibly technical discussions where 
various people were quite obviously representing the interests of their 
employers.  I'd rather the potential for conflict were obvious.

Put another way, quite people *do* speak for their employers, who don't 
buy into the IETF's vision of the process.  We can't stop it; we as a 
community are better off when connections are clear.

		--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb

---

From: "Joel M. Halpern" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 06 Aug 2005 10:42:10 -0400

I think the companies deserve a minimal amount of recognition for 
supporting our participation.
And our place in the world informs our perspectives.  That is why it is 
common in the routing discussions to have the question "how many people in 
this room are operators?"  We want their perspective.

Yours,
Joel M. Halpern

At 06:00 AM 8/6/2005, Keith Moore wrote:
>people break the rules and speak for their employers, but it's not wise to 
>assume that this is the case.
>