Subject: Response from a former IMPP Chair (Re: Last Call: A Model for Presence and Instant Messaging to Proposed Standard)

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 22:18:57 +0200

WRITTEN IN MY ROLE AS FORMER IMPP CHAIR

Dave and Marshall,

I have issues with your presentation of reality.
I am unable to see technical issues of real substance in your comments; the 
issues seem all to be procedural, and revolve around the missing update to 
the WG charter.
Since I was one of the WG chairs at the two IETF meetings immediately 
following the "group of nine" effort, I accept responsibility for this 
procedural error. The charter should have been updated.

However, I must take issue with some of your presentation of how the WG 
decided issues, as well as some of your specific issues.
In particular, your statement:

> The problem with the group's dichotomy between end-to-end vs. gateway
> goals was discussed repeatedly.  Only towards the end of the working
> group's effort did this appear to become resolved -- in the direction of
> an end-to-end content standard.  However, even then it was clear that the
> few remaining participants in the group continued to hold very different
> understandings of the goal.

is directly contradicting the minutes of the December 15, 2000 meeting of 
the WG in San Diego, which say:

> ROOT: Should messages passed wround in CPIM-compliant
> Q: do we think that we need to be able to pass around a pile of bits that
> can be signed:
> A: Rough consensus in the room (all but 1 raised hand yes)
>
> Q: Should CPIM specify structure of this message?
> A: All think it should specify the format.

The exact format was thereafter discussed in March 2001 and August 2001.
Because of (I believe) the failure of the editor to update the core CPIM 
document between February 2001 and November 2001, the group did not meet in 
December 2001; the format was discussed again in March 2002, July 2002, 
November 2002 and November 2002. At no time do the minutes record a 
decision of the group to revisit or reverse its decision to support a 
single format for interoperability.

For a further instance, consider this complaint:

> How can "duration" have any useful meaning when there is no baseline
> reference for the starting point or ending point of the duration and
> when Internet exchange latencies are completely unpredictable? In other
> words, when a participant receives a duration value from another
> participant, what does it mean? Duration relative to what point of time?
> We do not know how many seconds it took for the service data to reach
> the receiving participant.

The decision to use intervals was a very visible one in the WG, and none of 
the minutes I have read show this decision being challenged at any working 
group meeting; indeed, instead we see long wrangles over the meaning of 
"duration = 0", which is hard indeed to express in a format that has a 
"baseline reference".
While I have not found this in the minutes, I believe the justification for 
using duration was the same as that used for the sysUptime in SNMP: That 
one should NOT require the elements of an IM system to have synchronized 
clocks.

A common thread running through the minutes of IMPP meetings is the 
perception that all major issues have been settled:

San Diego, December 1999:

> The goal is that the group will finish its work and then go away,
> hopefully before the next IETF.

London August 2001:

> LD: We've reached some kind of closure on all major points; really hope
> this will have been the last IMPP meeting (i.e., that we can wrap this
> into revised & finished documents before the next IETF).

My conclusions:

The working group has suffered from very slow document updates, a bad error 
in judgment (mine) re charter update, and repeated re-raising of old closed 
issues (for instance, at Atlanta in November 2002, Dave Crocker could be 
heard re-raising the issue of the need for loop control, which the group 
had discussed and decided in December 2000, choosing hopcount as the 
preferred mechanism in March 2001).

However, I find the criticisms raised against the process leading to the 
forwarding of these documents to the IESG to be very much off target.

               Harald Alvestrand
               Speaking as a former chair of the IMPP group

---

From: Robert Elz <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 17:09:45 +0700

Date:        Wed, 16 Jul 2003 22:18:57 +0200
    From:        Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
    Message-ID:  <209845592.1058393937@localhost>

  | However, I find the criticisms raised against the process leading to the 
  | forwarding of these documents to the IESG to be very much off target.
  | 
  |                Harald Alvestrand
  |                Speaking as a former chair of the IMPP group

Hmm - I know nothing whatever about the IMPP working group, nor any of
the issues raised by Dave & Marshall, but your response (this message)
makes it appear that the WG activity was all wrong.

Your characterisation of what happened revolves entirely around what
happened at WG meetings (during IETF meetings), and cites minutes of
those meetings as evidence of WG decisions.

That cannot possibly be correct.   WG decisions are supposed to be taken
on the WG mailing list, decisions at IETF meetings are close to no-ops
(though they can provide a lot of beneficial advice).

Your message should have been citing the mailing list archives for the WG
as justification of the decisions made, and lack of unresolved (serious)
objections.

kre

---

From: Marshall Rose <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 11:19:59 -0700

> ...

harald - first, thanks very much for the note.

dave and i are having a bit of trouble co-ordinating our post-vienna schedules,
so it will probably be a couple of days before we can respond in full to your
reply. (but, don't worry... we will!)

in the meantime, may i ask a question: it was unclear to me whether your reply
was meant as an alternative interpretation of events or an actual rebuttal. if
the former, that's fine. if the latter, then there were a large number of things
which you just skipped over. should i interpret that as your agreement, or, if
not, do you plan on discussing those issues in the future.

of course, if you didn't intend to address those issues, that's fine. i'm just
trying to figure out your position with respect to the breadth of material we
presented.

thanks!

/mtr

---

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 13:26:52 +0200

Marshall,

I found that when I tried to understand your note, it seemed to consist of 
three themes:

- A basic disagreement on the direction of the group, and an interpretation 
of history that appeared to say that the group had not consciously and 
conscientously made the decision to go down the path you disagreed with
- A number of issues that made sense given the interpretation above
- A number of relatively minor issues

I decided to address the first one; the second group did not make sense to 
address as long as we had disagreement on the first one, and the third one 
did not seem to me like one I could contribute any particular expertise in 
solving; in a less polarized context, I would see most of these as "minor 
wording edits" that the document editors would handle as a matter of course.

I am looking forward to your response.

                       Harald

--On 19. juli 2003 11:19 -0700 Marshall Rose <[email-masked]> wrote:

> dave and i are having a bit of trouble co-ordinating our post-vienna
> schedules, so it will probably be a couple of days before we can respond
> in full to your reply. (but, don't worry... we will!)
>
> in the meantime, may i ask a question: it was unclear to me whether your
> reply was meant as an alternative interpretation of events or an actual
> rebuttal. if the former, that's fine. if the latter, then there were a
> large number of things which you just skipped over. should i interpret
> that as your agreement, or, if not, do you plan on discussing those
> issues in the future.
>
> of course, if you didn't intend to address those issues, that's fine. i'm
> just trying to figure out your position with respect to the breadth of
> material we presented.
>
> thanks!
>
> /mtr
>
>

---

From: Marshall Rose <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 10:45:27 -0700

> WRITTEN IN MY ROLE AS FORMER IMPP CHAIR
    
harold - as indicated in my previous note, here is a reply!
    
although i'm the only address listed on the "From:" line, that's a
limitation of the mail client i'm using. please consider this a note
from Marshall and Dave.

so, we'll start at the end of your reply, because that's more direct.

> forwarding of these documents to the IESG to be very much off target.

we confess that we're a bit disappointed with your response. we spent
considerable effort laying out a detailed complaint, and even included a
table of contents, viz.,
    
> >      1.   PROCESS FAILURES
> >      1.1. Lack of participation and constituency
> >      1.2. Out of scope with charter
> >      1.3. Failure to resolve issues raised in the working group
> > 
> >      2.   TECHNICAL FAILURES
> >      2.1. Confused and conflicting goals
> >      2.2. Incomplete and unclear specifications.

but you addressed the least interesting of these.
    
perhaps issue 2.2 can be handled by applying some engineering and
editing. yet they weren't, when they were raised in the working group.
as things stand, the document is simply not viable on its own.
    
the other issue you addressed is issue 1.3, while we might quibble with
your timeline, we think you're missing the big picture, which is bleak.
the work has no serious constituency. it cannot perform the task it
describes for itself, as a gateway between heterogeneous services. few
people created the work. few are interested in using it. 
    
in other words, issues 1.1, 1.2, and 2.1 are fatal. they're also
essentially un-arguable. (or rather, no one's popped up to argue with us
over them and it's been a month, eh?)
    
issue 2.1 tells us that the documents are going to be a failure in
theory, and issue 1.1 tells us that the documents are going to be a
failure in practice.
    
finally, issue 1.2 tell us that we're not even following our own rules.
charters matter. otherwise, why have them? sanctity of the charter is
perhaps the single most "sacred" aspect of the way we do things.

we confess, if the work were "good", we could look the other way on the
process problems. but, let's face it, no one is arguing that we're
talking about a quality work product here. in fact, no one is even
arguing that the work product is going to see any meaningful use in
production.
    
for the life of us, we can't figure out why anyone would want to defend
this work...
    
/mtr
    
ps: secondary to the fatal problems with the specification, your note
cited other process issues. you claim that a working group meeting was
not held due to failures of the document's editor to revise the document
between february and november, 2001. presumably you mean the cpim main
document, rather than the msgfmt, pidf or datetime documents that were
revised during that time. fortunately, your former co-chair's
"(Un)updated todos" note of 14 oct and the cpim document editor's note
of 29 oct make clear that the real reasons for not holding a meeting,
which has nothing to do with the editor...