On Feb 16, 2012, at 4:04 PM, John C Klensin wrote: > A current Last Call has apparently brought on another of the > "please tell all your friends to send in supportive notes, even > if they don't say much of anything substantive" campaigns that > we see from time to time. When those notes come from people who > do not routinely participate on IETF lists, they provide very > little real information unless we have suddenly taken up voting > or otherwise counting notes. Whatever we might otherwise think > of company positions, a note that said "I work for <xyz> and we > need this and intend to implement and deploy it" would be real > information that the community could consider where "I am an > individual and +1" does not. Sadly, such endorsements, > especially from people who are not active IETF participants, add > to the noise and might prevent someone who was still genuinely > trying to understand the pros and cons (presumably including all > of the IESG) from seeing a new and substantive argument, no > matter how well-grounded. > > I note that there are some folks in the community who seem to > favor these campaigns when they like the cause and not if they > do not. > > But I wonder whether, in the interest of noise reduction and/or > support of our "no voting, even by active participants" > position, there be any sympathy for a Godwin-like rule that the > first appearance of many no-information "I support this" > endorsements from people and constituencies who are not regular > participants on the IETF list should immediately trigger a state > in which all further statements from that "side" would be > ignored or would end the discussion entirely? > > Yes, I see the difficulties in figuring out the details of such > a rule and implementing it and am mostly joking. Mostly.
Because we don't vote, the show of support with all the +1s really doesn't amount to much. I don't think even promises to implement carry much weight at last call. By the time some proposal has gone to last call, especially IETF last call, the issue of whether this will be useful to someone should have already been settled. I think that an endorsement like "I work for Cisco and we intend to implement this in every one of our products" is useful. But it's not nearly as useful as "this is a terrible idea, and doing this will prevent IPv6 from ever gaining traction". The objections raised in last call are really the point, not the endorsements. Yoav _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
