Subject: Re: [Terminology] WG Review: Effective Terminology in IETF Documents (term)

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2021 18:08:02 -0400

Mallory Knodel <[email-masked]> wrote:

> If we rely on the Inclusive Naming Initiative, for example, as an
> external resource, it is comprised of people who work for some of the
> very same companies that engage in the IETF.
Given that IETF participants represent themselves as individuals, this 
is completely irrelevant.  A person's employer has no bearing on the 
merit of their opinion.

Let's nip this kind of argument in the bud, please.

Keith

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From: Mallory Knodel <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2021 09:38:37 -0400

> is completely irrelevant.  A person's employer has no bearing on the 
FWIW Eliot was talking about expertise, not opinion.
> Let's nip this kind of argument in the bud, please.
Which argument?

-M

-- 

Mallory Knodel
CTO, Center for Democracy and Technology
gpg fingerprint :: E3EB 63E0 65A3 B240 BCD9 B071 0C32 A271 BD3C C780

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From: "Bron Gondwana" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2021 11:10:59 +1000

> Which argument?

I think I understood Keith here... let's see if I got it:

 1. People from companies A, B and C participate in the IETF
 2. Companies A, B and C also employee people who participate in external Organisation X
 3. Therefore, the IETF's interests align with Organisation X
This is the argument which I believe Keith rejects.  I'm also wary of it.  It's certainly possible that there will be alignment of interests, but the mere fact that employees of some large organisations are in both the IETF and another body is not evidence of alignment by itself.

Bron.
--
  Bron Gondwana, CEO, Fastmail Pty Ltd
  [email-masked]

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From: "Jim Fenton" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2021 19:22:46 -0700

Slight edit:

>  2. Companies A, B and C also employee people who participate in 

I’d say instead, “Companies A, B and C endorse Organization X”

> This is the argument which I believe Keith rejects.  I'm also wary of 
> it.  It's certainly possible that there will be alignment of 
> interests, but the mere fact that employees of some large 
> organisations are in both the IETF and another body is not evidence of 
> alignment by itself.

-Jim

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From: Mallory Knodel <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2021 10:06:56 -0400

On 4/27/21 10:22 PM, Jim Fenton wrote:

>> This is the argument which I believe Keith rejects.  I'm also wary 
>> of it.  It's certainly possible that there will be alignment of 
>> organisations are in both the IETF and another body is not evidence 
>> of alignment by itself.
>
Who made this argument?

Maybe Keith wasn't talking to me at all.

But just in case, I countered Eliot's argument that there are no experts 
on DEI in the IETF. He says IETF is a technical group with technical 
(only) experts. I pointed to another bunch of IETF contributor 
colleagues that form a technical group, which the IETF is counting on as 
experts in DEI.

-M

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From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2021 13:26:18 -0400

On 4/27/21 9:38 AM, Mallory Knodel wrote:

>> Given that IETF participants represent themselves as individuals, 
>> this is completely irrelevant.  A person's employer has no bearing on 
>> the merit of their opinion. 
What I was referring to was the argument that the employers of IETF 
participants has any bearing at all on this discussion. They don't.   
(Though it's possible that I simply didn't follow the point you were 
trying to make.)

But since you mentioned expertise, I'd like to follow up on another 
point you made:

> First, there are experts here. There are many of us in the IETF who in 
> big and small ways have dedicated our careers to making tech more 
> inclusive.
>
Nobody who has been in this industry for very long should believe that 
"dedicating one's career" to anything makes them an expert at that 
thing.   We all know people who have dedicated their careers to network 
something or other who are not experts.   There's a tremendous variation 
of depth (in any particular area) among IETF participants and industry 
professionals in general, and the amount of depth that any person has is 
only loosely correlated with the length of their experience in the industry.

That doesn't mean that expertise does not exist, but it's hard to 
evaluate.   (Particularly so for something as imprecisely defined as 
"inclusion")

But for better or worse (or some of each), in IETF working groups, we 
aren't compelled to adhere to the beliefs of "experts".    Working 
groups make decisions based on rough consensus.  Every participant 
decides on their own whether to contribute to that consensus based on 
whatever they see fit - whether they trust the opinions of some of the 
"experts" or believe themselves sufficiently knowledgeable to have their 
own opinions, or some combination of the two.   And who gets to say who 
is an expert and who isn't?   Again, that's up to each participant.

So even assuming that there are some "experts" in this WG, there's no 
assurance that the "experts" will dictate the decisions of the group.   
A small plurality of "experts" might be able to keep the group from 
claiming consensus on a particular decision, but for them to build 
consensus within the group is much more difficult (even if the "experts" 
agree among themselves).

And I think this gets to the question of whether an IETF working group 
is really a good way to make this kind of decision.    The working group 
process was created to deal with technical decisions, for which there 
are generally some technically recognizable notions of "goodness" 
against which participants of various levels of expertise can still 
measure a proposal.   For example, we generally agree that protocols 
should be reliable, that they should scale, that they should be secure, 
that they should be implementable on a variety of platforms, with 
reasonable efficiency, etc., and all of those things can be evaluated.   
That shared notion of "goodness" is about the only reason that "rough 
consensus" works.   Without that shared notion of goodness, people's 
opinions would be all over the map and not clustered around any center. 
    The fact that we still have some differences of opinion tends to 
obscure the fact that we actually agree on quite a lot.

But while we've occasionally used the WG process to address 
non-technical questions, I can't think of anyone offhand who has been 
through such a process who thought it worked very well.

The question before TERM would not be like the technical questions that 
working groups face.  Or at least, the notion of "goodness" against 
which the WG should evaluate any proposals in TERM, seems very poorly 
defined to me.   That's why I claim that the WG process is not likely to 
be a good way to address this question, even though most IETF 
participants seem to be okay with some amount of updating our language.

Or to put it a different way, if such a WG were going to have any chance 
at success, it might help to try to first establish some widely-shared 
notion of "goodness".

Keith

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From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2021 15:34:42 -0400

On 4/27/21 9:10 PM, Bron Gondwana wrote:

> This is the argument which I believe Keith rejects.

Yes, and completely so, for lots of reasons.

Though it's possible that Mallory intended something slightly different, 
e.g.

Companies A, B, and C employ people who participate in external 
Organization X, which has expertise in this subject area. Therefore, 
companies A, B, and C have experts in this subject area whom they can 
send to IETF.

To clarify: I don't know that this was what Mallory intended, and I 
think I'm stretching to speculate here.

Keith