Re: IETF Adelaide and interim meetings for APPS WGs

[Vernon Schryver <vjs at calcite.rhyolite.com>]

> From: Keith Moore <moore at cs.utk.edu>

> ...
> 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    vjs at rhyolite.com