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

[Jeanette Hofmann]

On 28 May 2003 at 21:58, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:

> 
> 
> --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.

Polis in the Greek sense marks a social space, which consists of free 
people with equal status and rights who are concerned with the well 
being of all members. 
The polis strives for the good life. A distinction between politics and 
technology doesn't make sense in such a concept of politics. 

The IETF could be interpreted as a polis in the modern sense. It is 
supposed to care about the Internet as opposed to single companies or 
applications. 

Jeanette 

> 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
> 
>