Subject: [iucg] non member question on Avatar

From: jefsey <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2010 00:38:12 +0100

Dear IUCG participants,

I have received a post from a "non member" that I do not publish as 
it is in fact questioning the IUCG. So, I prefer to produce the text 
in extenso interspread with my responses as the facilitator of this list.

At 14:17 12/02/2010, [email-masked] wrote:
>From: Philippe Capello <[email-masked]>
>To: [email-masked]

Dear Avatar,

Since you react to the last exchange on the list I suppose you are a 
member of the [email-masked] list and try to use your @gmail.com mail 
address as an example mail to better support your point. However you 
obviously are not a "JEDI" since we do not know you. (JEDI are 
"Jefsey's Disciples" as per a pun of Martin Düerst. Most are 
france@large participants and often have a gmail.com mail address and 
may or may not use their personal name).

>Engineers have been using Captcha to separate humans from machines 
>in electronic communication, aka reverse Turing tests, for a while, 
>and there's probably something the Internet Users would be 
>interested to say about this sort of tools, but I'm interested in a 
>different albeit similar question: how to separate real humans from avatars.

The question of the separation or of the filtering between real 
humans and avatars is a fundamental architectural question for the 
Intersem, since the target is to support ideas, without 
discriminating on the origins, human or not, which human, or which 
machine. This is the Intersem neutrality.

>I have nothing against avatars in general, in particular in a 
>context full of them, like Second Life, but on an geek mailing lists 
>where consensus is appreciated based on the volume of converging 
>opinions (technocratia), it doesn't make sense to account several 
>times the same position expressed using different voices but by the 
>same person.

The "raison d'être" of the [email-masked] mailing list is to address 
the need of Internet Users to interface IETF engineers, not to mimic 
them. Moreover at their worst (technocracy)!

As you may read it in our Charter the IUCG is not oriented towards 
decisions based upon a consensus. To the contrary it is meant to 
document multiconsensus, i.e. established stable possibly diverging 
positions having clarified enough one another to document their 
interoperability. This means that the same person under different 
pseudo may defend opposing contributions for each of them to work better.

The most important objection we, Internet Users, have to the IETF is 
that there only are avatars there: not the real persons but their 
employee's avatar. We do support RFC 3869 and we would suggest the 
IETF to remove every commercial reference. Moreover, it is impossible 
to know all the business ties there are among the employee's corporations.

>Does anyone know of a system that could be used in the IETF mailing 
>list context ?

Our experience is that pseudos are quite useful to insure an open debate:
- yourself you use it to ask some "risky" or "tricky" question.
- nobody knows if you are a retired person, student, engineer, 
manager, president, minister, Tina Dam, Vint Cerf or Russ Houssley or 
myself. What count's is the quality of your ideas.
- in a broken English language debate, every language is accepted in 
the hope someone will translate the good points in English. This is 
what happens in some cases I know of. Some well known persons, on 
this list or not, accept to edit or translate the contributions they 
receive. In other cases contributions are sent with questions and 
options to someone the author acknowledges as his mentor on the 
matter. So the mentor uses the mail he/she forwards as a way to 
respond the real author in using his own very points.

>Phone, video, foaf references ?

We are like ICANN's blog: we accept every contribution using a pseudo 
or a well known e-mail. And we will do that until IETF will impose 
some kind of disclosure, but we will lobby first for the disclosure 
to include all the possible intellectual COIs.

>But first, is there an IETF process document somewhere that 
>explicitly calls out as illegal the participation in IETF mailing 
>list using fake names ? (it could be illegal with no way to enforce 
>it right now, that's fine).

Your question seems to call for a discrimination based on the person, 
rather than on the pertinence of the contributions. This is rather 
surprising in an SDO. Look, for example, since I am banned from some 
IETF lists (for having obtained "against me" the consensual RFC I 
needed) I delegated an old math teacher in a wheel-chair to represent 
my positions. It was interesting because as a user, I had the opinion 
of another user looking at designers positions. I learned a lot from 
this dialogue. However, when he came to the IETF - he did not really 
spoke English so he used Google's translation tool - he was accused 
to be a sock puppet of mine. This was clarified further on after he 
discussed with some IETF leaders who had French. But this was 
unacceptable. And eventually he resigned upset at the IETF racism. 
This was time wasted. Anti-IETF spirit. He was even asked to show an 
ID, people called him home and afraid his wife, he had to get red listed.

Last but not least, we are touching very important issues. I too 
received a few anonymous calls and suggestion that I could get a 
broken nose. Not everyone likes to get that kind of things recorded 
in Google associated to their name for ever.

>Thanks

Now, the real issue. Is it worth to get the "same position" repeated.

1. this is the decision of the authors. There is no censorship 
(however we dislike rants and spleen)
2. in the case you probably quote there are significant differences, 
but the supported position is a position we share, have tuned, and 
which is IUCG documented for a while and required by our Charter. So 
it may be new to you, but it is a founding consensus. The debate is 
probably not there.

Last word. Avatars and avalects (variation of the language of a 
person is an important R&D question for multilinguistics, the 
Intersem, mental authentication, cognition acquisition, etc.) So, we 
would love to have a test bed project on them. Would you be 
interested working on it?

Best
jfc
iucg, facilitator