Re: Nomcom candidate name announcement alternatives

[Dave Crocker <dcrocker@brandenburg.com>]

At 02:17 PM 7/16/2002 +0200, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> Dave, thanks for this systematic approach. Let me argue one of your points:

only because I am hyper-sensitive to the fact that I have strong opinions 
about thus stuff and that I voice them, I want to stress that the goal of 
that summary document was to be objective reporting.  although i might have 
gotten facts wrong, the document was IN NO WAY intended to represent my 
personal (or professional) opinions.  Any leakage of my opinions was an 
accident and needs to be fixed.

On the other hand, I'm not doing reporting in THIS note...


> It might. On the other hand, by putting more information into public hands,
> we might decrease electioneering and attempts to manipulate, simply by
> making any such actions impossible to conceal.

No way, no how.

We have plenty of data that shows real-world behavior -- in this forum -- 
that are entirely at odds with your theory.

I think that your view is shared by quite a few others and I think that it 
would apply well to the "old" IETF.  The new IETF acts more like the rest 
of the world.

It is a great thing that the IETF has increased diversity of 
participation.  Wider range of expertise.  More perspectives on solutions, 
impacts. Blah blah blah.

However we need to deal with the realities of that diversity.  One of those 
realities is that we now see more efforts and stronger efforts to 
manipulate processes for purely political purposes and in highly political 
fashion.

Just to choose a non-nomcom example (while still staying generic) I'll note 
that we now see very vigorous efforts by existing working groups to prevent 
the creation of parallel working groups that might be in any way 
competitive.  The objections are not based on technical merit, but fear of 
competition.

One of the problems with being a nice person is the tendency to assume that 
other people are nice.  One of the problems with dealing with things 
constructively -- not policially -- is the tendency to assume the same from 
others.

In the old IETF, even the vigorous, nasty fights were fundamentally direct 
and honest.  The new IETF has to deal with people who behave quite 
differently from that.

d/

----------
Dave Crocker  <mailto:dcrocker@brandenburg.com>
Brandenburg InternetWorking  <http://www.brandenburg.com>
tel +1.408.246.8253;  fax +1.408.850.1850