Message-Id: <6.2.1.2.2.20050803150908.049d17c0@mail.jefsey.com>
Date: Wed, 03 Aug 2005 15:55:04 +0200
To: Spencer Dawkins <spencer@mcsr-labs.org>,
	"IETF General Discussion Mailing List" <ietf@ietf.org>
From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <jefsey@jefsey.com>
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Subject: Re: I'm not the microphone police, but ...
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At 14:16 03/08/2005, Spencer Dawkins wrote:
>>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.
>
>What a wonderful world it would be, if that were true...
>
>I'm pretty sure that less than 0.001 percent of the management teams at my 
>IETF sponsors since 1996 had any idea that I was even ATTENDING the IETF, 
>and our process documents point out repeatedly that it's not necessary to 
>actually attend IETF face-to-face meetings in order to participate in the IETF.
>
>My current sponsor is quite clear that I am, and will be, participating in 
>the IETF, but that's not true for most of the people I talk to on IETF 
>mailing lists. It's quite possible to be an excellent document editor, and 
>probably even a reasonable working group chair, with very minimal sponsor 
>awareness. I've paid my own way to IETFs twice, both times as WG/BOF 
>chairs, and I know that others have paid their own way many more times 
>than I have.
>
>If an employee doesn't fill out a travel authorization to attend the face 
>to face meetings, does anyone on the management team even hear this tree fall?

Spencer,
I am afraid we are not on the same wavelength. We all did what you say. But 
there is a time when you set up your priority budget. Attending the IETF is 
the cost of a test server I need to oppose running tested code to people 
using the IETF against our non-profit R&D for their own profit. I would 
have no problem with their agenda, if the simple disclosing of their roots 
made  heir legitimate commercial relations known and obvious to all, 
leading the community to be less impressed by the size of their Draft and 
more attentive to its real interest, for who.

I am considering the seldom cases which counts. Where Sponsors are really 
able to use the IETF, and the IANA, as a tool to protect their own 
interests, biasing the Internet standard process. In this case the strategy 
is not managed by a sponsor but through a consortium or a de facto 
alliance. The management is informed and is in the lead. I think it is not 
often (I know directly only three cases), but it is where the real danger 
is: because the Internet architecture is not separately discussed. So, it 
may be decided for long through small committing details (I know from 
experience). This is the case where RFC 3869 describes the Internet R&D 
financing by commercial interests: controlling that small committing detail 
is of key importance before investing. Then the investment will in turn 
commit the internet to the concerned interests. In the three cases I 
refered to one is a failure, one is important but less than it could have 
been, the last one is just being carried.

In these cases you have two or three geeks/managers involving themselves, 
to show who is the boss when needed. Then you have well educated 
specialised set of people, to author Drafts, co-Chair the WG, assume 
complementary Draft preparation, manage the IANA registry, etc. Then you 
have standard Members to sustain the "consensus" (by exhaustion) and to 
erode opposition to that end. The game is not to produce the best document 
for all, but to "win" against "competition's" propositions. Leading to the 
fun of seeing an intended BCP (as a successor to an RFC also dealing with 
Internet standard process issues) to invent a standard track proposition 
forbidding existing practices and running code.

I submit that publishing the resume of all the participants and the source 
of their IETF funding would help everyone understand these cases and would 
reduce them to welcome (but probably less staffed and funded) standard 
propositions. Commercial money cannot be dealt with the same as public 
money, as non-profit money, as personal money. Or you unbalance the whole 
process.

jfc




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