Subject: IETF vs. global politics (was RE: I-D file formats and internationalization)

From: "Nelson, David" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Dec 2005 15:49:00 -0500

Phillip Hallam-Baker writes...

> Ah here you make the mistake of thinking that the IETF community is
the
> Internet community. Perhaps forty years ago, but certainly not today.
> 
> The IETF does not make any effort to be representative of the Internet
> community.

I beg to differ.  I think the IETF makes a very reasonable effort by its
extraordinary attempts at openness and inclusiveness: no formal
membership requirements, no voting status, no government-appointed
delegates, freely available work-in-progress and final documents,
decisions made on the mailing lists, no requirement to travel to
face-to-face meetings to participate, streaming audio of meeting
sessions, jabber rooms, and the list goes on.

It seems to me that the primary objections of those who feel
disenfranchised surround a specific set of existing IETF behaviors:
conducting all its business in English and using US-ASCII for documents
(instead of something that supports non-Latin character sets), and a set
of alleged IETF behaviors: being somehow insensitive to the economic,
social, political and cultural aspirations of non-native English
speakers, and having some hidden agenda to retain US hegemony of the
Internet.

I think that's a lot of stuff and nonsense.  Certainly there is room for
inclusion of non-Latin character sets in documents for items such as
names and addresses of contributors.  If the suggestion is effectively
that the IETF needs to conducts its business like the UN, with
simultaneous translation into six languages, I think that's impractical,
and probably detrimental.

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