Subject: Common sense, process, and the nature of change

From: Ted Hardie <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2012 14:46:30 -0500

At the plenary last night, Andrew Sullivan set off a series of
conversations at the mic lines by asking what seems at first to be a
fairly simple question:  why is that we seem now to have more process
and less reliance on common sense?  As those at the plenary will have
noticed, the conversation did not stick directly to that question, but
went through some interesting history, called for a bit of data,
entertained a plea for mentoring, and then questioned whether point
solutions or major change would actually work to improve the IETF.

Thinking a bit about the directions that conversation took, I think
there is both a relatively simple answer to Andrew's question and a
much larger piece of context that need to be teased out of the
discussion.  The relatively simple answer is that we don't just use
common sense any more because we don't want to trust individuals as
much as we used to.  That lack of trust isn't directed at the current
IESG, IAOC,  or IAB, but at future incumbents.  We have come to the
idea that allowing a current set of office-holders to make ad hoc
decisions implies that all later incumbents will share that ability.
Since we don't know those later incumbents (how could we?), we don't
trust them; since we don't trust them, we don't want to cede to them a
power that might later get abused.  So we attempt to use structure and
process to restrict those unknown future incumbents.  That's
interesting in part because we believe in precedent enough to worry
that ceding decision making will grant to later officer holders
equivalent power, but we don't believe in it enough to believe it will
guide what the later officer holders will do.  That, again, likely
stems from a lack of trust.

So why don't we trust the future IETF NomCom that picks those folks or
the incumbents when picked?

I think that's where the larger context comes in.  The IETF is not
simply an engineering organization, it is a mission-based
organization.  Our mission is to make the Internet work and grow.
Belief in that mission is something built into the context of the
IETF, and it is part of what helps each of us guide our decisions
here.  Where some SDOs get compromises entirely by horse-trading, many
of the compromises that let the IETF work by rough consensus actually
come about because of that shared mission.  We recognize that
compromise to get interoperability is a key part of what lets the
Internet continue to work and grow.  We both give our technical
insight to that mission and we subordinate our technical desires to
it.

That works in part because we know that others here share that
mission.  We don't recite it at meetings or make it the subject of
ceremonies, but we recognize that spending enough time here will cause
both that mission and the whole-Internet engineering perspective to
seep into the bones of the participants.  We get a direct sense of it
from those with whom we interact (Pete and Murray's exchange last
night was a great precis of that process), we get an indirect sense of
it from broader social networks, and we have institutionalized it in
things like the NomCom eligibility rules.

I suspect that some of the trust issues we have with imagined future
incumbents actually comes from a subconscious fear that we won't be as
successful at passing on a belief in that mission as we have so far
been.  That may be because the current mechanisms are largely ad hoc
(as Joe's comments on mentoring hinted); it may be more free form than
that.  To counter that concern, we may want to extend the methods we
already do have (Edu teams, newcomers socials, and so on) for longer
parts of the initial participation periods.  We may even want to
consider new ways of generating affiliation to our core goals.
However we do it, it seems likely that energy put into making sure
that the IETF's mission is part of each participant's understanding of
their work will return benefits both to the IETF now and when those
unknown future incumbents take office.

The other thing that context suggests is probably equally important.
As a mission-based organization, we have a natural touchstone for
evaluating change.  If a proposed change furthers the mission of the
organization, we can likely manage the transition it implies, whatever
the scale might be.  If it hinders the mission of the organization, it
shouldn't be taken on however cheaply and easily it might be done.

Maintaining the power of the incumbents? Not important.  Maintaining
the current structures? Not important.  Change for change's sake?  Not
valuable.  Making sure the mission gets done?  Pretty much the only
thing that matters.

Since this is all long since baked into the bones of most IETF
participants, this no doubt seems a bit trite or even silly.  But
there are times when it is important to say things out loud, and this
may be one of them. If we are considering why change in the IETF
increasingly looks like ossification and if we are considering how to
fix that, we should keep our mission in mind.

My two cents as an individual,

Ted Hardie

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2012 15:42:58 -0500

Ted,

Thanks for a thoughtful note.  I think you may well be on to an
explanation here.  But there's something of a bitter irony about it.

> stems from a lack of trust.

[…]

> shouldn't be taken on however cheaply and easily it might be done.

Both of these seem right to me, but the irony is that the fear of
unknown future incumbents is all by itself creating the warm, dark
place where we are growing the things that hinder the mission of the
organization.  For one of the things that allowed the mission to get
done was the ability of the organization to look at strange, one-off
cases, decide that they were a one-off case, make a decision, and move
on.  

The increasing weight of the processes simply don't allow that any
more, and it causes people outside the IETF to say things like, "I'm
not taking this work over there to be nibbled to death by ducks."  The
recent process invocation in the unfortunate IAOC situation is not the
only example of this: WG formation is difficult and expensive.  WGs
spend a great deal of time tip-toeing around delicate issues in an
effort to avoid making the appeal mechanism work.  These are changes
too, even if they're just the result of gradual accretion, and they
are bad for the mission.

Best,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]

---

From: Ted Hardie <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2012 15:55:11 -0500

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 3:42 PM, Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]> wrote:
> organization.

I agree that this can be the case.  That's part of the reason I
believe putting energy into ensuring we share a common sense of our
mission is worthwhile; it will help us avoid the desire to institute
process changes that derive from a lack of trust.

Those efforts will likely not be sufficient, though, to tackle other
issues.  EDU team-style efforts may help us with both trust issues and
its resultant duck-nibbling, but they are not going to help with the
structural complexity of references (a different issue raised last
night).  I hope, though, that we can use a common touchstone for
evaluating process changes.  That may help us work out what efforts
are worth the time and effort not just for the IETF, but for the
Internet.

regards,

Ted Hardie

---

From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2012 16:09:34 -0500

>>>>> "Ted" == Ted Hardie <[email-masked]> writes:

    Ted> want to trust individuals as much as we used to.  That lack of
    Ted> trust isn't directed at the current IESG, IAOC, or IAB, but at
    Ted> future incumbents.  We have come to the idea that allowing a
    Ted> current set of office-holders to make ad hoc decisions implies
    Ted> that all later incumbents will share that ability.  Since we
    Ted> don't know those later incumbents (how could we?), we don't
    Ted> trust them; since we don't trust them, we don't want to cede to
    Ted> them a power that might later get abused.  So we attempt to use
    Ted> structure and process to restrict those unknown future
    Ted> incumbents.  

ted, I'm a strong proponent of process over common sense (within limits)
but don't believe the above captures my rationale at all.

I am as worried about the current officers as much as any future
officers.

Especially when people have a lot of power, It's difficult to come
forward and say that you think they've abused that power or made a
decision that negatively impacts fairness.

Also, I believe people--even very good people--are bad at making
decisions that impact fairness, especially when they care significantly
about the outcome of those decisions.

So, for myself, as the importance of the work an organization does, the
maximum I am willing to trust anyone with regard to process issues
decreases significantly.
This is not a negative statement about any office holders, past, current
or future.
This is simply a belief that it is important to use more process as the
importance of things affected by the process increase.

I believe that the IETF's impact has increased and so I believe that the
IETF needs more process than it used to.

--Sam

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2012 16:18:42 -0500

Ted,

On 11/8/2012 2:46 PM, Ted Hardie wrote:
>       why is that we seem now to have more process
> and less reliance on common sense?
...
> much as we used to.

And the decisions have dramatically larger effects.

And those making the decisions are held dramatically more accountable.

And the IETF community is dramatically more diverse, which means far 
less shared culture about process.

And...

And...

 >   That lack of trust isn't directed at the current
> IESG, IAOC,  or IAB, but at future incumbents.

This assessment has what empirical basis?

Quite a few appealing alternative theories could be postulated.  I hope 
that selecting among them is subject to more analysis than a popularity 
contest of subjective feel.  ("It's the answer because we all decide it 
feels right.")

>     We have come to the

This is a rather existential community.  Most of our behaviors here 
pertain to the present, including present actors.

But really, Ted, where does your idea come from, that the issues with 
our current operation hang on some amorphous concern about unspecified, 
future actors, rather than some set of our current actors?

> organization.  Our mission is to make the Internet work and grow.

We like to utter phrases like that.  They are nice phrases about goals 
that no one could reasonably object to.

However they actually have essentially nothing to do with the concrete 
technical work we do here, except to the extent we pay engineering 
attention to scaling.

In fact, lofty, abstract goals such as you cite almost certainly 
distract us from the pragmatics that we have the skills to attend to.

But feel free to cite specifics that distinguish between what we (would) 
do merely as an engineering organization, versus what we (actually?) do 
as an organization to make the Internet grow.

> come about because of that shared mission.

Oh?  It isn't because, for example, we simply worry more about 
engineering quality?  (When we actually do worry about it...)

>  We recognize that
> Internet continue to work and grow.

Whereas most of the IETF engineering discussions about compromise that 
I've participated in were in terms of what it will take to make things 
work.  You know, the sort of thing engineers worry about.  There are 
actually rather few marketing discussions about growing the Internet, 
during these engineering compromise discussions.

> shouldn't be taken on however cheaply and easily it might be done.

I'd be interested to hear some examples of when this has been done, in 
and for the terms you cite, since I don't recall participating in any.

d/
-- 
  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net

---

From: Ted Hardie <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2012 16:25:20 -0500

> importance of things affected by the process increase.
I think the old catchphrase for this was "rule of law, not rule of
men", and I agree that there are fundamental benefits of that
approach.  But the starting point of this discussion was questioning
why we seem to need process for everything--even one off situations
that have "special circumstances" all over them.  I think if we could
agree to evaluate the impact of individual decisions according to your
criteria ("what's the impact?"), before deciding on the need for
process, we would be standing on common ground.

But it sounds like we disagree on whether we can trust our current or
future leadership to make that sort of call.  While I think that
increased trust would increase the latitude that the community would
extend to our leadership in ways that would improve our lot, it sounds
like you would believe that this would grant too much power.  Is that
a fair summary of where we disagree?

regards,

Ted

---

From: SM <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2012 13:34:42 -0800

Hi Ted,
>IESG, IAOC,  or IAB, but at future incumbents.  We have come to the

The five second sound bite is "why don't you trust your leaders"?

>decisions implies that all later incumbents will share that ability.

Yes.

>stems from a lack of trust.

It's a bit more complicated than that.  If there is a perceived lack 
of transparency, process may be viewed as safeguarding the 
individual's interest.  I once had a chat with an IETF participant 
who asked what to do as the WG Chair took a bad decision.  There were 
two options:

  (i)  The Standards Process

  (ii) Talk to the person

The person did not mention Option (ii).  There is a newcomers' 
tutorial where people are lectured about the marvellous Standards 
Process.  There is very little socialization in the IETF.  The I* 
bodies are lacking when it comes to communication 
skills.  Unfortunately, when the I* bodies communicates the community 
asks "why are you bothering us with this"?

>organization.  Our mission is to make the Internet work and grow.

Frankly, I don't know what the IETF is.

>insight to that mission and we subordinate our technical desires to

It is difficult to get people to compromise.

>unknown future incumbents take office.

I was pleasantly surprised by the level of comments at yesterday's 
plenary.  The Edu team is absent except for a few hours a year.  The 
newcomers' social is IETF-centric.  I like the idea of extending the 
initial participation periods.

I read the last sentence as building trust.  People might share your 
core goals if they "trust" you and they agree with the goals.  That's 
different from convincing them.  People put in energy if it is in 
their interest to do so.

>valuable.  Making sure the mission gets done?  Pretty much the only

Agreed.

Regards,
-sm

---

From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2012 23:06:21 +0100

> Frankly, I don't know what the IETF is.

You are not the only one, and this needs to be fixed.

Eliot

---

From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2012 19:08:30 -0500

>>>>> "Ted" == Ted Hardie <[email-masked]> writes:

    Ted> I think the old catchphrase for this was "rule of law, not rule
    Ted> of men", and I agree that there are fundamental benefits of
    Ted> that approach.  But the starting point of this discussion was
    Ted> questioning why we seem to need process for everything--even
    Ted> one off situations that have "special circumstances" all over
    Ted> them.  I think if we could agree to evaluate the impact of
    Ted> individual decisions according to your criteria ("what's the
    Ted> impact?"), before deciding on the need for process, we would be
    Ted> standing on common ground.

    Ted> But it sounds like we disagree on whether we can trust our
    Ted> current or future leadership to make that sort of call.  While
    Ted> I think that increased trust would increase the latitude that
    Ted> the community would extend to our leadership in ways that would
    Ted> improve our lot, it sounds like you would believe that this
    Ted> would grant too much power.  Is that a fair summary of where we
    Ted> disagree?

Yes, it sound like a fair summary of where disagreement would be if it
exists.
I don't know if there are cases where we've recently disagreed about how
much latitude to grant our leadership.

As an example, I think we both agreed that it was reasonable for the IAOC to vacate the
position  when the facts were first presented. I can't remember if you
are currently on the iaoc list. I did send them a question wondering if
they were taking the right approach, but that question was based on an
error in my understanding of the facts. Once that was clarified, I
apologized for wasting time.

When additional facts came to light, I favored using the recall
process. However, several of our leaders seem to have agreed with me
that the additional facts changed the situation and made the formal
process desirable to invoke.

Leader: We have a member of our IAOC who is not responsive. We've done a
bunch to try and contact them. We want to declare the position
vacant. Have we missed anything?

Participant 1: I think you always need to use the recall process for
this!

Participant 2: I've looked at the impact page. I can't see any of the
types of impact that are indicators of needing formal process that apply
here. So, I think this is fine.

Participant 3: Well, I've looked at the impact page too, and if our
leaders had the ability  to  remove someone who was participating simply
by claiming they were not, it could have all sorts of impact on
fairness; you could remove people you disagree with etc.
because of these reasons. Have we missed anything?

Participant A) I think  that we really need a real process here.

Participant B) I've looked at the impact page, and this 

Participant 4: Sounds like your concern would be addressed  if the
leaders made it clear that we'd be in a different situation if the
inactive member came forward and objected to their position being
declared vacant; that would remove the potential impact you're concerned
about.

Participant 3: O, yeah, you're right. So if we're clear that complete
silence on the part of the person being removed is a factor here, I
think it's fine to allow a lot more trust.

My point is not for the "impact page" to be a formal part of process; in
fact doing that would go against the entire idea of building trust in
our leaders. My thought here is to find some mechanism to tease apart
the issues where one person thinks trust should be given and another
disagrees. My hope is by having discussion points we can focus our
discussion and better come to agreement on whether there is impact when
someone disagrees. Ultimately, I think you'll need something like this
to have a constructive response to giving leaders more trust when
community members seem to want to give less trust.

---

From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2012 09:12:38 +0900

> much latitude to grant our leadership.

iaoc/marshall

---

From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2012 08:26:00 +0100

>> much latitude to grant our leadership.

Not only did we not trust the leadership, but we also didn't trust the
plenary!  THAT has to change.

Eliot

---

From: t.p. <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2012 09:06:16 +0000

----- Original Message -----
From: "SM" <[email-masked]>
To: "Ted Hardie" <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2012 9:34 PM

> asks "why are you bothering us with this"?

I agree that socialization and communication are weak in the IETF but
disagree as to the cause.  Socialization depends on communication and
there is a spectrum in communication from the richest, when I am
standing in front of you, looking you in the eye, to the poorest, a
tweet.

E-mail, the sine qua none of the IETF, is towards the poorer end of the
spectrum, so that as the work of the IETF has become dominated by
e-mail, with little happening face-to-face, so the socialization and
communication - except at the most technical level - has decreased.
Socialization breeds the idea of a common goal, a mission if you will.
If I know you and relate to you, then I am more willing to compromise,
to negotiate, to go the extra mile (such as at the weekend) or to give
up my pet concerns in order to produce a better standard.

Without such socialization, then work becomes dominated by other things
such as the bottom line, legal actions or the fear thereof, a lack of
trust and so on; and yes, we then need more process to ensure progress.
I think that the evolution of the IPR processes in the IETF would be a
good case study for this.

Tom Petch

---

From: Ted Hardie <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2012 09:50:20 -0500

> Ted,
Hi Dave,

Thanks for taking the time to respond.  I think some of the points you
make below echo some of the issues Sam raised, particularly that the
scope of authority makes increased process appropriate.  I'm still
thinking about that, and I don't have much more to say on it right
now.  There were a couple of other questions you asked that I answered
in-line.

> On 11/8/2012 2:46 PM, Ted Hardie wrote:
<snip>

> But really, Ted, where does your idea come from, that the issues with our
> current operation hang on some amorphous concern about unspecified, future
> actors, rather than some set of our current actors?

Both during the recent discussion of the whether a body can declare a
seat vacant and in previous process discussions, I have seen a lot of
postings and heard a fair number of hallways conversations that boiled
down to "this sets a bad precedent".  Some of my thinking about this
is simply trying to understand what people think is happening when
they say "it sets a precedent" in our context.

My experience may, of course, be unusual, and people could also be
using that as a cover for issues that actually pertain to the current
set of leaders.

> We like to utter phrases like that.  They are nice phrases about goals that
> no one could reasonably object to.
>
> technical work we do here, except to the extent we pay engineering attention
> to scaling.

I think we simply disagree about this.  I've pointed a lot of new
folks to BCP95/RFC 3935 (our mission statement) and I think it helps
folks understand why we work on what we do and what our goals are.  It
absolutely comes across as trite in some contexts, something I
admitted at the end of my initial mail.

<snip>

> Oh?  It isn't because, for example, we simply worry more about engineering
> quality?  (When we actually do worry about it...)
>

I think there's more than engineering quality.  A good recent example
of this comes from the RTCWEB working group.  The group decided during
its charter phase to avoid interoperability failure during its
negotiations by making some baseline audio and video codecs mandatory
to implement.  During the audio codec selection decision, there was an
explicit effort to make sure that the codec could be implemented and
deployed by the widest possible set of actors.  That was a compromise
by the folks who had sunk costs in implementations of other codecs, in
order to grow the pie will be RTCWEB.

Did anyone mention our mission statement during that discussion?
Absolutely not.  But I think that class of compromise, where we put
the goal of growing the system above our individual interests, does
happen pretty often in the IETF.

YMMV.

regards,

Ted

---

From: Scott Brim <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2012 09:32:03 -0500

Ted: Very nice but I would go further.  You believe that everyone in the
IETF has either internalized the mission or will in the course of
participating.  I think the IETF has already lost that unity of mission,
particularly with the influx of corporate participants who were not
around in the idealistic days.  For them the new normal is to use the
IETF as a tool for creating competitive advantage - bleeding the golden
goose while they feed it.  Even back at the IETF@20 celebration, when
long-time participants got up and spoke passionately (and really well)
about the shared mission and values, there were people listening who
reacted with "that's not why I'm here, I think they're out of touch with
the new IETF".  Even having a unified mission is no longer a shared
principle.  So I would guess the main concern, the main anxiety leading
to love of process is not that our future leaders won't be able to
execute on the shared mission we all feel - rather it is that our future
leaders won't have the same mission or even the same principles we do
now, and they cannot be trusted to execute based common sense - there
won't be any "common" sense.

Scott

---

From: "Randy Presuhn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2012 10:26:37 -0800

Hi -

> From: "Scott Brim" <[email-masked]>
> Cc: "IETF" <[email-masked]>
> Sent: Friday, November 09, 2012 6:32 AM
> Subject: Re: Common sense, process, and the nature of change
>
> IETF as a tool for creating competitive advantage -  ....

As I see it, that "new normal" has been the norm as long as I've been
working on IETF-related stuff - over twenty years.

Every organization has some sort of "mission", though the expectation
that all (or even most) participants have fully bought into and internalized
that mission is probably at best a useful fiction.  It is true that behaving as
though one is on board with the mission will help gain the cooperation
of others, and, in the case of the IETF's mission, yield useful work.  But
it's no guarantee, and my experience has been that other considerations
seem to take precedence over the IETF mission for many participants.
Even in those cases, however, behaving as though those participants
were primarily motivated by the IETF mission generally seems the best 
way to sustain the collaboration, or at least the illusion of collaboration,
and hopefully get *something* done.

Cynical? Perhaps, but in other threads we get glimpses of the litigious
hell that is the probable alternative.

Randy

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2012 18:57:48 +0000

> working on IETF-related stuff - over twenty years.

Which is exactly why Harald wrote the mission statement in the first
place. Inevitably there will be people who come here for the benefit
of their employer's business objectives. It's the job of those who care
about the Internet as a whole to proselytise those people.

I agree with your cynicism, but IMHO the mission statement is the best
tool we have, so we should use it.

I think there is scope for a plenary rant about this, and for a new slide
in the newcomers' presentation, which quotes "reject kings and presidents"
but doesn't currently mention the mission statement afaik.

(http://www.ietf.org/newcomers.html does mention it, but I don't know
how many people start there.)

     Brian

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2012 10:17:33 -0900

> and hopefully get *something* done.

This is quite possibly where peer pressure or groupthink or
whatever can possibly have a gating effect, I hope.  In the
best of all possible worlds understanding that cranking out
vast numbers of crappy documents reduces your effectiveness
within the organization because other participants read your
crappy documents and assume that you don't know what you're
doing.  Reputation within the organization matters.

That said, it's also important to think about how we make
decisions.  Consensus-based decision-making does require some
sort of shared commitment to the process and to organizational
happy stuff, because it's otherwise too easy to block progress.
Again, I think it's worthwhile to find some way to communicate
that if you're working within the IETF and you promote things
that are good for your employer and bad for everybody else,
people notice and your overall effectiveness suffers.

Melinda