[Bloat] Fwd: voting rights in general

[Dave Taht]

This has been an ongoing discussion on the ietf mailing list,
spiraling down into useless discussion, once again.

I'd kicked it off with:
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/2mjhGErGYRWjKb0oZH_Ddh4YI0Y

(Something like 7% of the people doing ietf work currently get a vote
for top management, due to the "must attend" requirement.)

there is a related discussion on the same list, about fixing the recall process.

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 2:56 AM
Subject: Re: voting rights in general
To: Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com>
Cc: Stan Kalisch <stan at glyphein.mailforce.net>, IETF Discussion
Mailing List <ietf at ietf.org>


On Mon, Mar 25, 2019 at 3:43 PM Brian E Carpenter
<brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 26-Mar-19 10:13, Stan Kalisch wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, Mar 25, 2019, at 5:00 PM, Keith Moore wrote:
> >> Different people have different ideas about what "unpleasant" means.
> >
> > They do, but what is significant is the common, shared subset of those ideas within a community.  That subset alone can significantly determine who is part of a community, and who is not.
>
> That's true. And as we have seen more people from non-Anglo-Saxon and then non-European cultures participate, the meaning of "unpleasant" has continued to change, and probably to fragment. I had the good fortune to start my professional life in the particle physics community, where being brutally frank about a colleague's technical errors was normal, so the traditional IETF culture was no surprise to me. But I have often seen it (by body language) to be an unpleasant shock to new participants. Some people get used to it, but some don't. So while I've known Keith long enough to simply say "You're wrong, Keith" and be sure he wouldn't take it as an insult, I hope I would always be more careful with a new participant until I know them better. (For clarity, in this case, Keith's not wrong.)
>
> There's a reason the ITU and ISO tend to use very diplomatic language and very formal procedures. I'm not saying we should do that, but it isn't OK to just ignore the issue of different cultural expectations.

In my life, I have been very empowered by the idea of clear, and frank
discussions. The oft-brutal game of "Dealer",
at Xerox PARC, the only mandatory meeting, where the participants were
encouraged to go at each other with every form of technical criticism
- and then go have a beer - made for good code.

Also, I have found "kelly johnson's rules" to be very effective.
Notably, in ietf context:

"The designers of the airplane should be on the shop floor while the
first ones are built."

What george carlin damns as "soft language" in (NSFW)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY
infests the ietf today.

In order to be successfully implemented, a specification MUST be
short, clear, and unambigious.

 "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over
public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman


>    Brian

>


--

Dave Täht
CTO, TekLibre, LLC
http://www.teklibre.com
Tel: 1-831-205-9740


-- 

Dave Täht
CTO, TekLibre, LLC
http://www.teklibre.com
Tel: 1-831-205-9740