policy wrt politics (was RE: be-tarask language subtag registration form)

Peter Constable petercon at microsoft.com
Sun Apr 1 02:56:44 CEST 2007


Can we safely judge when all the opponents have reached consensus? Doesn't that create a risk that we're making political evaluations? When some opponent comes along after the fact and says, "You didn't wait to hear my opinion," won't we appear to have taken sides in the political debate?


Peter


-----Original Message-----
From: mrc at ndcms.cac.washington.edu [mailto:mrc at ndcms.cac.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Mark Crispin
Sent: Saturday, March 31, 2007 9:53 AM
To: Peter Constable
Cc: ietf-languages at alvestrand.no
Subject: Re: policy wrt politics (was RE: be-tarask language subtag registration form)

On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, Peter Constable wrote:
> a)  Reject any request with political issues to ensure this list avoids
> politics?
> b)  Evaluate any request solely on non-political criteria? (We would
> still need to ensure that subtags are non-offensive.)
> c)  Try to judge on a case-by-case basis what is the best way to walk
> through the political minefield?

d) A modified synthesis of (a) and (b).  In the event that any request is
determined to have political undertones, then reject ALL requests
associated with the politics until such time as ALL the players in the
politics can come up with a unified proposal that is acceptable to ALL of
them.

This explicitly means that any player can veto his opponent's proposal,
but only at the cost of blocking his own proposal.

In effect this is "children, don't bother the adults until you learn to
play nicely together".

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.


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