Plenary decision?

[Hallam-Baker, Phillip]

> Phill,
> 
> First of all, thank you writing a much calmer and much more thoughtful
> e-mail.

Your comments would be far more effective if you did not start off your
message with an unnecessary ad-hominem attack.

While your projections appear to demand a public response given your
treatment of our private conversations, I will leave that to the end of the
note to avoid boring the group.


The empirical fact that you refuse to accept is that the IETF decision
making process is failling to create a result in a timeframe that is
acceptable to any of the stakeholders except for the IETF. Furthermore
forums with alleged 'heavyweight' processes are making decisions far faster
than the IETF can hope to.

With XKMS we have gone from starting a WG to the end of last call in 2
years. The only IETF working group I am aware of that has managed that is
BEEP, which regretably failled to actually gain buy in from the key
stakeholders in the process and has consequently been undeployed. In fact it
is signal that a proposal can make it through the entire IETF process
without notice being taken of the important fact that the XML Web Services
world is based on XML Schema and not DTD, failure to recognize that issue is
the principal reason that the market is unlikely to even get to consider
BEEP.

The XKMS experience is not isolated however, it is the norm. SAML 1.0 was
completed in 18 months, WS-Security has begun interop testing after 9
months. 

The main reason for this is not the process, it is the cycle time. In the
IETF the cycle time is in effect four months, the time between IETF
meetings. In the other processes the cycle time is two weeks, the time
between con-calls.

The longer cycle time in the IETF is leading to disengagement. I have not
read the core PKIX document now for several years. I am not sure that anyone
else in the company has either.


Response to Ted's personal attack:

It is a pity that you have chosen to disregard the traditional netiquette of
not posting private conversations to a public list in the manner you did.
Perhaps I would be able to reply in the calmer more thoughtful mode that you
claim to aspire to if you could bring your own behavior to meet the accepted
social norms.

In the political arena I am more familiar with, posting a vehement denial
that you have ambitions to hold a particular post is itself regarded as
being an exceptionally ambitious move, particularly when that denial is
intentionally brought to the notice of a much wider constituency