At 03:35 AM 4/9/00 -0400, Peter Deutsch in Mountain View wrote:
>Which raises the interesting question as to what the participants would
>hope to
>be the outcome of such a working group and whether we could possibly move
>towards something ressembling a technical consensus, given the current
>polarity
we've done it more than once, before.
>I've seen us spend a lot of time engaging in working groups in which some
>number of the participants has as their goal the invalidating of the
>underlying
>concept or torpedoing the process itself. Having been there, done that and
First, let me compliment you on getting the 'has' correct. I'm envious,
since it took some time to parse the sentence carefully and discover that,
once again, Canadian education beats the tar out of average US education...
There are always some people who object to the details of any interesting
work. Hence the real question is a) whether there is a substantially
larger, interested constituency interested in making progress, and b)
whether that larger constituency has the benefit of a working group chair
able to manage the process well enough to keep the disrupters under
control. The larger and more diverse IETF does make this management task
more difficult, but it is not impossible.
>That isn't to say I disagree with you, Dave. There's definitely work to be
>done
>here. It's just that this is one hairy tarball, and although there's going to
Yes. Lots of legitimate opportunity to get bogged down in the difficulty
and complexity. That also makes the task more interesting, doesn't it?
>be lots done in this area over the next couple of years we've probably reached
>a fork in the road where the IETF has to take stock of itself before it can
>play a useful role. If it doesn't do that I predict that some of the major
>architectural and implementation decisions in this particular subspace will be
>taking place outside the IETF. And clearly, some would think that a good
>thing.
"some" always do. however, while the IETF can not and should not try to do
everything, this task seems entirely appropriate, since it requires a broad
range of technical talents, across most of the stack, to get it right.
d/
=-=-=-=-=
Dave Crocker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Brandenburg Consulting <www.brandenburg.com>
Tel: +1.408.246.8253, Fax: +1.408.273.6464
675 Spruce Drive, Sunnyvale, CA 94086 USA
