Problems vs Social Dynamics (Re: IESG proposed statement on the IETF mission)

Harald Tveit Alvestrand harald at alvestrand.no
Thu Oct 16 12:43:07 CEST 2003


[limiting distribution a little]

--On 15. oktober 2003 11:06 -0400 Melinda Shore <mshore at cisco.com> wrote:

> It's an interesting document, but it looks to me a bit much
> like a problem description and I'm not sure how it relates
> to other existing work (the problem description document in
> the problem working group, most obviously).  I particularly
> liked the discussion of the IETF mission - it could provide
> the basis for tackling one problem that's been raised on
> a number of occasions, which is that the organization doesn't
> have a clear sense of mission or vision.  Even though in the
> first paragraph of the "Social Dynamics" section you say that
> "As they are neither good nor bad, it is not appropriate to
> call them "problems;" rather think of them as social forces
> and dynamics" a number of them really are framed as problems.
> Indeed, it would be hard to define some way in which statements like
> "making integration more difficult" are not problem statements.
>
> I'd really like to see the document, which I think has good
> fundamentals, refocused on mission and goals.

I think of this text (which was a collective work of the IESG, btw - I 
stand behind the words, but cannot take any special credit for them) as 
having two parts - one is the IETF mission, another is a view of the forcs 
that drive our present issues.

These two have different purposes and targets, so it seems likely that they 
will eventually detach from each other and become separate documents.

The discussion of "social dynamics" documents an attempt to understand 
*why* we have the problems we have, rather than naming the specific 
problems - it's trying to work at a different level than the level that the 
problem-statement WG has chosen.
So I don't think of this and the problem-statement work as conflicting 
descriptions - this is rather an attempt to look at the same reality in a 
different way.

Makes sense?

               Harald





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