Subject: Re: [idn] Supporting list for Draft-liana

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 6 Sep 2001 11:16:10 EDT

Liana Ye <[email-masked]> wrote:

>  No, not all of the names are actively participating in
>  the WG discussion, but all of them are in computer,
>  computational linguistic or computation fields with at 
>  least 5 years of working experiences as far as I know. 
>  Are there guide lines on who is qualified to give support?  

and James Seng <[email-masked]> responded:

>  No defined guideline but it is expected the people should at least be wg
>  members. I could ask my mom, my father, my bro and my wife to support my
>  XXX draft but people is obviously going to question the validity of the
>  support.

I am not a member of the WG.  I am a member of this mailing list who 
subscribed via the normal "public" channels because I was interested in the 
subject matter, specifically the question of which ACE will be used in the 
IDN system.  In general I have not especially favored the addition of 
language-specific hacks (like Soobok's CJK code point shuffling) and 
non-Unicode solutions (like Liana's StepCode).

However, based on what I know about Unicode encoding schemes and transfer 
encoding syntaxes, and what I have learned about the various ACEs, I did 
offer my support for AMC-ACE-Z about a month ago.  Was this wrong?  Should I 
be considered not qualified to cast a vote in a straw poll because I am not a 
WG member?

Obviously, asking the neighbor's 9-year-old son to support my IDN solution 
would be bogus, but in general the dividing line is not clear between who is 
qualified and who is not.  Liana's supporters may have knowledge in this 
field and may have something intelligent to contribute, even if I and other 
list members disagree with the proposal.

James wrote:

>  Ultimately, whether one draft get accepted still depends on the
>  rest of the wg members support, not your just 7 supporter.

This is the real point.

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California

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From: Paul Hoffman / IMC <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Sep 2001 09:20:53 -0700

There is no formal definition of who is a WG member. When determining 
if a real proportion of the WG is interested in considering an 
Internet Draft, a reasonable rule of thumb for the chairs might be 
"are the people supporting this draft even reading the mailing list, 
and have they been doing so during the discussion of the other 
alternatives?".

So, seven people might join the mailing list now and say "we support 
the Foo draft", but that isn't really relevant, because they have not 
seen the discussion of the other drafts. On the other hand, if 
someone has been reading the mailing list for the last six months, 
even if they have been silent, they can probably exercise good 
judgement when they say that they support a particular draft, or a 
particular option. This isn't about voting: it is about using sound 
technical judgement.

Please see ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3160.txt for an 
introduction to the IETF. It is pretty clear that many, possibly 
most, of the people in this WG have never participated in the IETF 
before, so it is quite understandable that they don't understand the 
rules or, more importantly, the motivation.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium

---

From: "Bright Fulton" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Sep 2001 13:12:02 -0400

> ... On the other hand, if

Thank you for mentioning this.  I think it has been suggested before that
one must be active in discussion in order to vote.  This would make sense
if our credentials to talk intelligently about the task at hand could be
verified before we made it on the list.  Instead, the quality of ones
activity must be weighed, as should the longevity of the participation.

(I would even go so far as to say that some discussion has been wasteful
enough to weigh negatively against the proposal that those members who
indulged it vote for.)

Bright Fulton