Tony,
This is a very interesting discussion. I have a couple of questions
below.
On Dec 3, 2008, at 9:01 PM, Tony Li wrote:
Hi Lixia, Michael,
|>> (3) It's not up to us (or any central authority) which tiny
changes
|>> get made
|>
|> if you are saying the Internet has no boss, then I agree.
|> But I do believe that it is our job to understand what is
driving the
|> trend, so that we figure out how best to influence or facilitate
the
|> changes.
|
|Right, I think we're in agreement here, we just stated it a bit
|differently -- when you say influencing and facilitating changes, I
|think you mean what I meant when I said developing and
|promoting new tools.
I think you underestimate the power of the I*TF to help focus
techonological
development. If we, as a group, reach consensus on an approach and
start to
implement it, then it carries an enormous amount of weight in
directing the
rest of the industry. Now, that does NOT mean that we get to
dictate the
solution. In fact, if we converge on something that the industry
things is
a non-starter, then it's just wasted effort.
Could you explain what kind of things are non-starters for industry?
However, the power of a
consensus can cause thought to crystalize in one direction very, very
rapidly. Our deployment of CIDR is a perfect example of this. In the
course of about two years, we made a decision on how we wanted to
go, went
off, wrote the documents, wrote the code and deployed it. Done.
CIDR is one success story. However, there are perhaps many more
failure stories from I*TF and other standardization organizations,
e.g. inter-domain IP multicast, . They also had group consensus when
they're developed. So it would be great to learn some lessons from
them.
A related note: I found the IAB draft " What Makes For a Successful
Protocol?" (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-iab-protocol-success-04)
quite informative. Some of the initial success factors listed in the
draft are "Positive Net Value (Meet a Real Need)" and "Incremental
Deployability".
Lan
************************************************
Lan Wang
Assistant Professor
Computer Science Department
University of Memphis
Memphis, TN 38152
Phone: 901-678-2727
URL: http://www.cs.memphis.edu/~lanwang
***********************************************
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