Is this really where we want to go? (was: Re: Selecting leadership, take 2)

[John C Klensin]

--On Saturday, 07 December, 2002 05:50 +0100 Harald Tveit 
Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no> wrote:


> Thanks John - thoughtful thoughts should always be welcome.

thanks

> one word on fixes:
>
> I don't want to stop improving things while this goes on.
> We'll always be working with things like tracking
> improvements, chasing old stuff down, resolving comments
> speedily, adjusting attitutes, working on training and so on.

I hope so.

> as you say, there are lots of problems that do NOT need any
> changes to the process to solve.

And at least some problems that don't need solving.  I note that 
Geoff and Marshall focused precisely on a set of solutions that 
don't require process changes.  For those cases in which I 
disagree with them, the disagreements lies (for different cases) 
in all of the areas I hinted at, i.e.,

	* sometimes we disagree about what the problem is
	
	* sometimes we disagree about whether the problem is
	important enough to be worth effort
	
	* and sometimes we disagree about whether the proposed
	approach/ guideline will do much about the problem.

some are addressed in your list above, and some are not, again 
independent of importance and effectiveness.

> but I don't think those are the underlying problems that led
> us to where we are now. And I'd like to have those talked
> about.

Sure.  No disagreement at all there, and my note of two weeks 
ago tried to identify some of those underlying problems and 
propose ways to think about, if not solve, them.  By turning 
your sentence above around, we get to a different way of 
describing what I'm concerned about: One way to proceed on this 
would be to try to figure out "where we are now", and then "how 
did we get here", and then "which parts off how we got here led 
to problems".  I think those questions are deeply interesting 
from an historical and philosophical point of view.  But, 
especially since it was clear in Atlanta, and has become more 
clear from some of the discussions on the list, that we don't 
all agree on "where we are now", they also have extremely high 
likelihood of being a waste of time.

Instead, rather than trying to assemble a complete picture of 
either "where we are now" or "what problems do we have today", 
I'd like to see where we can say "this is a problem, it can be 
solved in isolation, a solution is...".  Probably that implies 
going after the low-hanging fruit first and I think that is 
useful as long as we are careful to distinguish the edible 
low-hanging fruit from the indigestible or irrelevant ones.  My 
guess, as I indicated in my note of two weeks ago, is that we 
will get to the structural problems soon enough --much sooner 
than trying comprehensive problem analysis by WG first.

And, in both cases, I don't think we should waste time on 
comprehensive problem analysis unless there is at least a 
strawman solution to poke at concurrently.  As an example which 
I hope is not too crude, suppose someone felt that an important 
problem was that we don't have enough time for WG sessions at 
IETF meetings and that four times as many two (or more) hour WG 
slots are needed as we have now.  Well, I suggest that, if we 
are looking at problem statement and possible remedies 
concurrently, we could kill that one backwards: if we conclude 
that no one is going to seriously consider either IETF meetings 
that run two or more weeks, or sessions from 0700 to 0300 every 
day, we don't even need to do an in-depth analysis of whether 
"not nearly enough meeting time" is a problem we need to solve.

best,
   john