Subject: Re: IETF Adelaide and interim meetings for APPS WGs

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 17:45:05 -0700 (MST)

> From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>

> ...
> RFC 2418 states:
>
>    Interim meetings are subject to the
>    same rules for advance notification, reporting, open participation,
>    and process, which apply to other working group meetings.

> ...
> - This applies to all face to face meetings held for the purpose 
>   of conducting working group discussion and to which the working 
>   group is invited, even if labelled "informal" or otherwise 
>   labelled to distinguish them from official working group meetings.

I'm not a lawyer, but that sounds like it might conflict with the U.S.
Constitution's provisions concerning freedom of assembly.  It also sounds
hard to police; if some working group participants encounter each other
in an airport waiting room, are they not allowed to talk business?  What
about participants who work for the same outfit and see each other daily?

Are you going to apply the same rules to meetings of the IAB and IESG?

You could doubtless fix those modest hassles with the wording of this
demand that RFC 2418 be honored, but what is the point?  Unless you going
to slide the IETF the rest of the way into the ITU/IEEE/ANSI swamp, won't
the mailing lists continue to be the only official forums for the working
groups?  Won't the working group meetings continue to be effectively
informal, slightly more than social gatherings? 

In other words and politically correct pretense asside, the IETF is not
an international organization.  Despite its posturing, the IETF is a U.S.
or perhaps North American organization that welcomes non-U.S. participants
and occasionally spends a lot of its U.S. participants' time and money to
try to make people outside of North America feel welcome.  If the IETF
did honestly aspire to be an international organization, it would need
the characteristics of the ITU (e.g. translators and high prices for
documents).  Do you think that would be a good thing?

(I've never attended an IETF working group meeting, despite working group
participation for a lot of years.  I've never felt the lack as far as
technical things go.  I can't find words in RFC 2418 that say that the
mailing list is the authoritative forum, which strikes me as a terrible
omission or catastrophic de facto change.)

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

---

From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 17:53:07 -0800

At 05:45 PM 2/14/00 -0700, Vernon Schryver wrote:
>Unless you going

I realize that you have not been (ahem) a regular attendee at IETF
meetings, but in my experience this has never been the case. Yes, we do
most of our work on mailing lists, and we check meeting consensus on
mailing lists before declaring it sealed in blood. But Face to Face
meetings have always been places where high bandwidth discussions take
place to clarify and progress work which is also being done on the mailing
list. They are official meetings.

So, by the way, are interim meetings, under RFC 2418. We could discuss
major initiatives which have made effective use of them  the entire SNMP
development, the development of RSVP and Diff-serv, the development of
OSPF, and many more. PPP development has happened as much at the
interoperability workshops held by Pac Bell and the PPP Consortium as they
have at IETF meetings.

Declaring an interim meeting to make progress is a Good Thing, and we don't
see a problem with that. But we need to make sure that the process is open
to all who choose to participate, and to that end the authors of RFC 2418
specified that there needed to be AD approval, sufficient notice, a strong
agenda, and minutes just as there are at the plenary meetings. Declaring an
interim meeting for the purpose of avoiding a plenary meeting is a slap in
the face to the many engineers who come from all over to the interim and
plenary meetings that we have had for lo these 14 years. They have paid
quite a bit of money and time to be intimately involved in the process. It
would be much easier, from a planning perspective, to have the meetings in
one or two spots, as the ITU does in Geneva, but we have always worked on
an ethic that says "if I am contributing to the work, the meeting must
occasionally be near me."

One sixth or more of our contributors come from Europe. A relatively small
contingent comes from the South Pacific. Quite a large percentage come from
North America. Hence, we put about one meeting in six in Europe and most of
our meetings in North America. Is it not fair to put one meeting in 47 in
the South Pacific? And why is it not an affront to those who have
faithfully come from there, have contributed and chaired working groups
from there, to complain about doing once what they have been doing for over
a decade?

---

From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 17:53:07 -0800

---

From: Graham Klyne <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 11:11:50 +0000

At 05:45 PM 2/14/00 -0700, Vernon Schryver wrote:
>try to make people outside of North America feel welcome.

As a non-US IETF participant, I found this statement mildly insulting.  But 
then I have to ask myself "why?".  It is true that a majority of IETF 
participation is US-based.  It is true that the IETF secretariat is wholly 
US-based.  It is true that the IETF is an outgrowth of a US national 
organization.  So on the face of it, your statement appears entirely true.

But I am still uncomfortable with it.  It implies that, somehow, any non-US 
participant is somehow a second class citizen, who is permitted to attend 
purely as a concession by the US elite whose organization this is.  Maybe 
that also is true -- but I don't have to like it.  I very much prefer the 
"pretense" that the IETF is an organization that provides technical 
direction for a truly global facility, and that it aspires to do so for the 
benefit of all the world's people, with equal status and consideration 
allowed to any who can participate, from wherever they may originate.

#g
--

------------
Graham Klyne
([email-masked])

---

From: Graham Klyne <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 11:11:50 +0000

#g
--

------------
Graham Klyne
([email-masked])

---

From: John Stracke <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 10:20:54 -0500

Graham Klyne wrote:

> "pretense"

In other words, the pretense is self-fulfilling: by claiming (and striving) to
be global, the IETF avoids driving away non-US participants, which makes the
IETF more truly global.

--
/================================================================\
|John Stracke    | http://www.ecal.com |My opinions are my own.  |
|Chief Scientist |===============================================|
|eCal Corp.      |Yes, sir, we've graphed the data. It's a smiley|
[email-masked]|face, sir.                                     |
\================================================================/

---

From: John Stracke <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 10:20:54 -0500

---

From: "Hans Petter Holen" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 09:05:42 +0100

----- Original Message -----
From: "Vernon Schryver" <[email-masked]>
> documents).  Do you think that would be a good thing?

Now if this were to be the case, we should definitely set up an
European Internet Engineering Task Force and so on.

In such a scenario, maybe different parts of the world would even
choose different working languages.

This would definitely be a win towards reducing US centricness.

But would it be a win to the Internet ?

-hph

---

From: "Hans Petter Holen" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 09:05:42 +0100

----- Original Message -----

-hph