Re: [ga] RFC 3774 on IETF Problem Statement

[Hugh Dierker <hdierker2204@xxxxxxxxx>]

Now this here is some good reading.  Go easy on Jeff W. and the Englais protocal. Asean (Association of Southeastern Asian Nations including, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and the like insist on Englais as the official lingua de forma. Respondeat Superior and Caveat Emptor included). I will bet you will have a hard time looking those phrases up unless you speak Spanish and Latin. Com ong xin loi. Well you will have a hard time with that phrase also unless you speak Viet. Well oops Je vu dre parle in francais. That is not right but try French. Acht du leiber meiner futs an meiter. Wrong again but a good Aleman can read it. ( funny german with a poteguese twist - not uncommon in Brazil) No! common language is a good idea period end of story.
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Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@xxxxxx> wrote:

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.


		
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