IESG restructuring (Re: Example of the One Liners out of context)

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand]

--On mandag, mai 26, 2003 13:35:46 -0700 Eric Rescorla <ekr at rtfm.com> wrote:

> Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald at alvestrand.no> writes:
>
>> what do other people think here?
> Maybe I've misunderstood Randy, but "real work vs. politics"
> strikes me as a false opposition. Getting real work done in
> organizations with more than a few people who have divergent
> goals is an inherently political activity. Sure, that sort
> of politics can be conducted in a more or less civilized
> manner, but I don't think it's really avoidable.

I think we may have a language problem on our hands.....

to me, the unique feature that attracted me to engineering is the fact that 
when an engineer has done his/her work well, the value of the result is 
greater than the value of what we started with.
In the IETF, this translates to "standards are beneficial to everybody".

I think "politics" derives from "polis" - city? - it's what humans do when 
they get together in large groups.
But what an engineer who says he "hates politics" means is, I think, more 
often related to an image of "politics" where the underlying logic is that 
of  splitting a fixed-size pie; in order to win, I have to make someone 
else lose; if someone else benefits, it means that I have less.

I think that's not the kind of politics we want to play. But that's not the 
only form of politics there is.

              Harald