Re: PROPOSED GUIDELINE: balance

[Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <brunner@nic-naa.net>]

>   | I suppose the question is how frequently do we think the desireable
>   | attributes change over time?
> 
> They probably shouldn't change all that often, but the ones that seem
> to be important seem to alter every year.   A few years ago, there was
> a burning desire for more apps knowledgable people on the IAB, from
> what's being said here, perhaps next year there will be a strong desire
> for more international reps on the IAB ...

A nuance perhaps, but simply being in one of the "pink bits" (Comonwealth,
as seen from schools), e.g., Austrailia or the UK, meets some unstated
criteria, but if an issue of fundamental (and hopefully transient) interest
arises, relating to, say, character set(s), that unstated criteria hasn't
gotten _us_ much. The same applies if 8859-* is added to ascii, and the "pink"
bits are virtually extended to include the happy-with-8, but not the above-8.

I'm still partial to ebcdic myself, and of course the 360 via the 029. First
loves are like that.

Now we know that the character set problem is solved and besides, it really
is someone else's problem, but if next year there is a "strong desire" for
more "international reps on the I*", this desire should propose to resolve
some specific technical problem(s), which could be as Brian originally cited,
the UK was at one point on the "other side" of a bandwidth/latency divide,
and the North American metro-and-backbone core is not univerally available,
or some other technical problem. This desire should not propose, as some
general proposition about hygine and manners, to replicate ICANN or the ITU's
notions of resource allocation -- between the crypto and raven discussions,
the problem isn't that US national policy would be controlling otherwise, we
are past that in our trajectory from-DARPA-to-<what>. We may have a problem
that some industry segments are more controlling than useful, but this isn't
necessarily a national problem solved by fungible "international reps".

"NomCom should think about balance"

As a general proposition this is insufficient. Had I 20/20 foresight, when
Avri got the NomCom job three years ago, instead of desultory interesting
conversation over bad coffee at NRC, I'd have urged the NomCom look at
a score of people in Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan for I* candidates. 

Eric