Subject: [Rfced-future] Where is the expertise? (was: Re: My hard constraints)

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2020 18:25:27 -0400

Martin,

TL;DR summary: Openness, transparency, and broad involvement is
important, but the IETF also needs to recognize when the
community does not have knowledge and expertise and deal with
that, not just assume the adequacy of IETF community wisdom.

     ----

Apologies for not getting back to the second part of my comments
on this -- have been busy and have hoped that others would
either make the point or clear up my confusion.  I've also
struggled to make it short.   Given the interim meeting/call in
an hour, time is obviously up.

I am confused.  I was confused and frustrated (your fault only
to a very small degree) long before you posted the note
excerpted below and those are major reasons why I've been so
quiet on this list.

--On Wednesday, August 26, 2020 12:22 +1000 Martin Thomson
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> On tricky problems we often do this little dance where no one
> says what they really want.   I think that it is important to
> be clear on what aspects of proposals are important as opposed
> to those that are either consequences of other decisions,
> arbitrary, or soft preferences.  So let me touch on three
> points of contention:
> 
> 1. where strategy happens
> 
> For me, my overriding goal is to define a system whereby
> substantive strategy decisions are both discussed and resolved
> in a public forum.  From this, I derive two hard objections to
> the drafts that Mike has so helpfully published:
> 
> * no body with closed membership
> 
> * no tenured, employed, or contracted "leader"
> 
> Requirements that meetings be public are not sufficient to
> achieve this goal.  IAB and IESG meetings are also routinely
> public, but the only places where true engagement occurs is at
> plenaries, which is inadequate.
>...

Openness and transparency and a greater degree of involvement in
community involvement is great.  A certain amount of skepticism
about designated "leaders" or designated experts is too and I
think we often have too little of it.   However, this gets tied
up with a problem I've observed occasionally in several
engineering communities in a variety of fields including the
IETF.  That is an implicit assumption that, because the
community and its members are expert in its particular area
--and, in the case of the IETF, often quite dismissive of people
who comment in that area but appear to lack expertise-- that the
expertise extends to all areas.  In those other areas, we need
to understand what we don't know, seek outside expertise, and,
to at least some degree, rely on it... just as we expect people
from very different areas, to rely on us.  While there may be
exceptions, it generally is a bad idea to have network engineers
doing brain surgery and an almost equally bad one to have brain
surgeons designing network protocols.

We can, and should, expect those outside experts to explain and
educate, but that expectation is reasonable only if we are
willing to listen and learn.

In some areas, the IETF has recognized its collective
limitations in other areas.  The creation of the IASA (and now
IASA2) is a reasonable example of such recognition because most
of us are not expert in the sorts of financial and
administrative areas IASA/IASA2 is suppose to provide expertise.
Perhaps the observation that few of us want to be heavily
involved with such things helps in that recognition.

But, in other areas, ones that I suggest including publications
strategy issues, determining whether documents are clear to a
broad range of readers outside our narrow community, making sure
documents are available and readable for _very_ long periods of
time (presumably long after the IETF disappears because
institutions like it usually do), we continue to prove quite
poor at understanding and accepting the gaps in the community's
knowledge.    Those topics are not unique -- I'll avoid a list
in the interest of space, but there are a few even more obvious
examples that lie closer to our protocol work.

So my confusion about your hard constraints and many of the
other discussions on this list is that we want high quality and
long-lived documents but, at the same time, we apparently want
to rely on the expertise and authority of the community rather
than finding actual experts and giving them authority.   I don't
see how those fit nicely together.  Perhaps some of us really
don't care about much of what I'm lumping together as quality
and longevity.  Others clearly do.  If so, just as your note
suggests, we should be having a clearer and more focused
discussion of that specific issue.  Similarly, the authority can
subject to oversight of various sorts but having the collective
wisdom of the community override expert judgment may be no more
sensible than believing that a committee of brain surgeons would
be good designers of network protocols even if one of them were
not.  We can insist that the expert(s) educate us, but only if
we have the time and inclination to be educated -- something of
which I've seen little evidence in this topic area or even in
the discussions on this list.

So, which is it?  Because, until we get there, it seems to be
that trying to pin down titles and exactly organizational
relationships might be missing the point.

thanks for listening,
   john

(or maybe that is an unjustified assu

---

From: "Martin Thomson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Sep 2020 10:58:40 +1000

Hi John,

I had a little trouble following the thread here, but to answer your most direct question...

On Wed, Sep 16, 2020, at 08:25, John C Klensin wrote:
> So, which is it?

So I did put the question of vesting authority in an individual as a hard constraint.  But only because one person is the ultimate closed board, where making internal communications open to public engagement or scrutiny is maximally difficult.

If there is something we need then yes, we need to know that we need it.  You and others have amply demonstrated that people are willing to agitate for contracting specialized expertise, so I'm not concerned about that aspect.  We then need to then source that expertise.  I have suggested this be ad-hoc, Brian suggests something like having someone on retainer (with some other duties that ensure they stay engaged).  I don't see that latter distinction as being as important relative to the key distinction: expertise is sought as advice.

Then finally we need to listen (and this seems to be your pivotal point).  You assert that future incarnations of some open group might either not seek advice when necessary, or might ignore such advice if it does not have some authoritative impetus.

Yes, we have numerous examples where individuals reject well-considered input from experts.  That might be more acute when advise is outside of the expertise of the group (in a general sense, I'm constantly impressed by the diversity of expertise represented in this community).  It's a threat we can acknowledge, but I don't think that the cost of the defense you propose is anywhere near worth paying.