[ga] RFC 3774 on IETF Problem Statement

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@xxxxxx>]

RFC 3774
Title:      IETF Problem Statement
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3774.txt 

A very good document about a governance issue for the IETF. True, IETF has a lot of problems but how many organizations are willing to do such an auto-analysis? Not ICANN, for sure :-) 

Most organizations prefer to repeat reassuring statements like RIPE-NCC mantras "We are the community and therefore we cannot be wrong".

A few sentences from the RFC to give you an idea (the last one being for people like Jeff W. who still did not catch that not everybody on Earth speaks english):

o  The IETF is unsure who its stakeholders are.  Consequently,
      certain groups of stakeholder, who could otherwise provide
      important input to the process, have been more or less sidelined
      because it has seemed to these stakeholders that the organization
      does not give due weight to their input.

...

 For an organization with 'engineering' in its title and participants
   who are likely to trot out the statement "Trust me, I'm an engineer!"
   when confronted with the need to find a solution to a particularly
   knotty problem, the IETF has, at least in some cases, extremely
   ineffective engineering practices.

...

Thus, the IETF appeared to have created an affinity
   group system which tended to re-select the same leaders from a
   limited pool of people who had proved competent and committed in the
   past.

   Members of this affinity group tend to talk more freely to each other
   and former members of the affinity group - this may be because the
   affinity group has also come to share a cultural outlook which
   matches the dominant cultural ethos of the IETF (North American,
   English speaking).  Newcomers to the organization and others outside
   the affinity group are reluctant to challenge the apparent authority
   of the extended affinity group during debates and consequently
   influence remains concentrated in a relatively small group of people.