Subject: Re: leader statements

From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 15:15:34 -0400 (EDT)

> From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>

    >> The IETF worked quite well (and produced a lot of good stuff) back in,
    >> e.g. the Phill Gross era, when I am pretty sure Phill's model of his
    >> job was indeed as a 'facilitator', not a 'leader' in the sense you
    >> seem to be thinking of.

    > Because we've got more than 120 working groups, thousands of
    > participants ... I don't like hierarchy but I don't know how to scale
    > up the organization without it.

I don't believe this necessarily invalidates my point.

Yes, a larger organization will need to make organizational changes (scaling
factors apply not just in protocols), but it is not at all clear that this
includes changing the role of the leaders from 'facilitators' to 'they chose
the direction, the rest of us follow' (which is what the original post seemed
to imply was needed).

	Noel

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From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 08:24:24 -0400 (EDT)

> From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>

    > we are in a big problem, and this is one major part. two decades of
    > lack of coherent architectural oversight is another symptom of this.

I have two issues with your observation.

First, while I agree we've been deficient in architecture, from personal
experience I can tell you that the I* community is remarkably resistant to
architectural guidance (which necessarily involves a rather long time-frame,
the kind of time-frame to which many engineers are inherently resistant,
focused as they are on the practical, here-and-now).

I don't know much about the other levels of the stack, but I can assure you
that at the internetworking level, the community has been remarkably
resistant to architectural guidance over the last 20 years - and I have the
arrows in my back to prove it (the lack of separation of location and
identity in IPv6 being only one of the largest).

Would attempting to push the I* down a particular path, different to the one
that the one it wants to take, have any different result than Kobe? I am not
sure.

Second, it's not at all clear to me that the people who are best suited to
provide architectural guidance are the same people who are best suited to be
facilitating leaders. They are very different skills, and to find both in one
person, at the kind of high level needed in the I* now that it is responsible
for a major part of the world's communication infrastructure, would seem to
me to be rather unlikely.

	Noel