Subject: Re: In Memoriam IETF web page

From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2012 13:14:07 -0400 (EDT)

> From: Scott Brim <[email-masked]>

    > If this memorial wiki page could be open to anyone who ever contributed
    > to any I* and for whom there was at least one person who wanted to
    > contribute the information, then fine.

Then it turns into (effectively) a phone book - and I don't know too many
people who read phone books.

Not that I object to the creation of such a construct - far from it, I expect
that historians in decades to come would probably find it valuable and
interesting. I'm not sure too many others, would, though (at least, in its
entirety - for individual people they already know, they might find it good).

So it's not a replacement for a Hall of Fame, which people might read, or scan
through, in its entirety. (Steve Coya, for instance, I would like to see
memorialized in an IETF HoF. He did a great deal for us, but people who joined
recently will have no idea who he was.)

    > If not, then it would be yet another situation where there will be a
    > line between the in-crowd and the out-crowd.

Every award ever devised is, implicitly, a line between the 'betters' and the
'lessers'. So you're saying we should get rid of them all - the Nobels, the
EU's Sakharov Prize (for which I have a soft spot because the first one went
to one of my great heroes, Anatoly Marchenko), etc, etc?

(And no, I'm not ignoring the difficulties in picking honorees, in any
system. Maybe that difficulty makes it too much trouble to have an IETF HoF.
But that's a different point entirely from the ethical wholesomeness of having
honorees at all.)

	Noel

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From: Scott Brim <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2012 13:25:26 -0400

Noel, in all of this you're assuming that being remembered on an IETF
wiki should be an exclusive award.

---

From: Theodore Ts'o <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2012 13:47:57 -0400

> people who read phone books.

Would you consider a war memorial a "phone book"?  Not that it's an
exact match, of course (or is it?  "The following people helped defend
the Internet against the scourge of OSI" :-), but that's also another
way of dealing with it.  Just make it a list, with the most recently
passed at the top of the list.

I suspect for those who think it's important, they would appreciate
the gesture, and for those who don't, well they probably won't bother
to look at the web page.  Just like I generally don't bother reading
all of the names listed at a war memorial, but I still support the
presence and existence of such memorials.  (And there *are* people who
go looking for the names of the fallen on such memorials.)

The bottom line for me is that if there are volunteers who feel
passionate about maintaining such a page, and if there is an opt out
for those really feel strongly about a few hundred bytes of HTML after
they pass away, does maintaining such a web page do significant harm?
And if it's important for some, why not do it?

Regards,

						- Ted