Subject: Re: Observations on (non-technical) changes affecting IETF operations

From: S Moonesamy <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2016 03:06:18 -0700

Hello,
At 15:03 29-02-2016, Jari Arkko wrote:
>The team has been working and they have today published
>an -00 draft. We'd love to have your feedback and thoughts
>on this topic!

The draft is interesting.  Some of the topics which might be of 
interest are: succession planning, fragmentation and cross-culture 
communication.

If I am not mistaken it is the first time that a (IETF) draft 
acknowledges that politics and technology are intertwined. The draft 
asks some interesting questions.  Will the IETF be able to address 
those questions?  There hasn't been significant ink-shedding in the 
IETF on those questions.  I'll highlight a point in the draft: "If 
participation is solely driven around getting one's own work done 
then that might deteriorate the quality of the overall output and 
thereby the relevance of the IETF".  As the draft mentions, it takes 
a serious investment of a person's time for IETF participation.  The 
question that a person could ask is: what's in it for me?

Regards,
S. Moonesamy

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From: Joseph Lorenzo Hall <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2016 06:44:56 -0400

On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 6:06 AM, S Moonesamy <[email-masked]> wrote:
> The draft is interesting.  Some of the topics which might be of interest
> are: succession planning, fragmentation and cross-culture communication.
>
> If I am not mistaken it is the first time that a (IETF) draft acknowledges
> that politics and technology are intertwined.

I guess it depends on what you mean by politics. There have certainly
been drafts that discuss law and policy considerations of potential
IETF standards, including this one from us from 2003 (long before I
was here at CDT), that while it never was seen through to official
Informational RFC status, still has a lot of good material in it:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-morris-policy-considerations-00

"This document is motivated by the recognition that technical design
decisions made within the IETF and other standards bodies can have
significant impacts on public policy concerns."

-- 
Joseph Lorenzo Hall
Chief Technologist, Center for Democracy & Technology [https://www.cdt.org]
e: [email-masked], p: 202.407.8825, pgp: https://josephhall.org/gpg-key
Fingerprint: 3CA2 8D7B 9F6D DBD3 4B10  1607 5F86 6987 40A9 A871

CDT's annual dinner, Tech Prom, is April 6, 2016! https://cdt.org/annual-dinner

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From: Joseph Lorenzo Hall <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2016 09:54:49 -0400

Someone kindly pointed out my stupidity off-list that yest this did
become an IAB-track RFC in 2013:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6973

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From: S Moonesamy <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2016 12:07:36 -0700

Hi Joseph,
>been drafts that discuss law and policy considerations of potential

[snip]

>significant impacts on public policy concerns."

Any attempt to influence the decision of a government is politics.  A 
technical design decision can have a social, economic or legal 
impact.  Would some of those decisions be viewed as political issues?  Yes.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy

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From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Mar 2016 04:21:16 +0900

politics is when two or more humans are involved.