Re: I'm not the microphone police, but ...

["JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <jefsey at jefsey.com>]

At 09:11 03/08/2005, Spencer Dawkins wrote:
> Hi, Philip,
> Our mileages probably vary ("welcome to the IETF, variable mileage is how 
> we know we're here!"), but ...
> In the working group chair training, we point out that the most important 
> thing working group chairs do, and the only responsibility they can't 
> delegate, is declaration of working group consensus.
> Call me a dreamer, but if there's one voice (which may or may not be from 
> another planet) in a working group, the chair's responsibility is to 
> decide if this is one of the hopefully rare cases where one voice SHOULD 
> derail apparent consensus, and if it's not - to say so!
>
> I understand the apparent advantage of saying, "well, if X says it's a 
> good idea, X is from a large ISP, so they are probably right", but this 
> doesn't prevent the second-order problem that large companies (ISPs or 
> not) have a range of employee IQs, and if you defer to one of the 
> low-order IQs because they work for Y, you may STILL end up in a bad 
> place. I've seen this bad place personally.
> I would hope that we evaluate ideas based on the message in most cases, 
> and not on the messenger. If that's not what we do in most cases, I THINK 
> this is a pretty fundamental change in how the IETF works.

Spencer,
the problem may also be that a WG is set-up to derail the opposition of a 
few individuals on a matter they know better. In that case the simple 
exposure of the business relations of the affinity group having proposed 
the WG shows that we may face a planet war.

IMHO your IQ point could also be considered the other way around. One of 
the problem identified by RFC 3774 is the increasing number of "standard" 
participants. I am sure large corporations would be more careful at 
sending  their high-order IQ if they known that their inputs will tagged 
with the company name. The worst thing I ever read in an IETF mail is "you 
oppose him: do you know who he is?". I think we should help the coporations 
of the authors of such mails to filter them out.

BTW an interesting debate we had over multilingualism is that every IETF 
Member should disclose his IQ. ... at least the difference between his IQ 
tested in his mother tongue and in English, or between in English and in 
his best foreign tongue.
jfc



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