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

[Eric Rescorla]

Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald at alvestrand.no> writes:

> --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".

Unfortunately, the two statements "greater than the value of what
we started with" and "beneficial to everybody" are not equivalent,
and I think that's part of the communication problem. For example,
consider what would happen if we were to magically deploy
IPsec in such a way that it caused no pain to any user. 
Beneficial to everyone, right? Well, not to the bad guys
who wanted to read your traffic. To take a more realistic
example, it's not clear that AOL benefits from the IETF
actually having a successful IM standard. [0]


> 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.
Indeed, it's not.

It's certainly true that there are political situations that are
zero sum games, but that's not the only kind of politics there 
is. One of the most important kinds of politics is deciding how
to coordinate positive-sum games.

To take an example from standards again, consider what
happens when we're trying to design a new network protocol.
One decision we have to make is whether to use an XML encoding
or an ASN.1 encoding. Neither is inherently better, but 
XML is much more convenient for people who already process
XML and ASN.1 is much more convenient for people who already
have ASN.1 codecs. 

So, assume we have company X-Ray, which currently uses XML 
and company Abel, which uses ASN.1. Their preference rankings
are shown below:

Abel:     ASN.1, XML, No standard
X-Ray:    XML, ASN.1, No standard

Now, both Abel and X-Ray are willing to lose the encoding battle
if that's what it takes in order to get a standard, but they'd
naturally rather win. [1] It's precisely this kind of situation
where politics is important, even if not particularly attractive.
Because if we don't find some way to do that kind of politics,
then we're left with No standard, which is even worse.

-Ekr

[0] Generally, "better for everyone" is known as "Pareto-dominant"
and "greater than the value of what we started with" is known as
"economically efficient".

[1] In this case, both ASN.1 and XML are Pareto-optimal.

-- 
[Eric Rescorla                                   ekr at rtfm.com]
           Web Log: http://www.rtfm.com/movabletype