IETF WAS Re: [governance] Enhanced Cooperation (was Re: reality check on economics)
Avri Doria
avri at acm.org
Tue May 22 17:23:20 EDT 2012
Hi,
You are right, I have not done a professional comparative analysis. Nor do I know of one.
But from a 30 year career of participating in all sort of organizations with all sorts of models, I find it to be the the most effective and the least prone to corruption of any I have had the pleasure to serve in. Also from a professional point of view based on an advanced degree that included counseling in organizational settings based on group dynamics , I find it to have the healthiest group dynamics of any organization I have been part of.
If you have spent years serving in the IETF as well as other organizations and judge it inferior, I would be glad to hear why. But unsubstantiated comments and the lack of a study we can all agree is unbiased, is hardly evidence.
avri
On 22 May 2012, at 17:03, Ian Peter wrote:
> I continually find the argument that "IETF works well" to be based on very
> little real analysis.
>
> I consider the IETF model to be one which which may have been suitable in
> the early internet days but which has probably outlived its usefulness. I
> think Tim Berners Lee knew that as long ago as the early 1990s when he moved
> WWW standards setting elsewhere.
>
> If the criteria for judging IETF is solving the Internet's main technical
> problems, it's hard to rank them highly. Basic matters such as security and
> identity and seem to still need a lot of work.
>
> If the basic criteria is creating lots of standards, they do quite well.
> There are thousands of them, often overlapping and sometimes unable to
> operate with each other. But if the criteria is adoption of standards, they
> don't do very well - from the 20-year-to-date slow adoption of IPv6 to many
> other standards that just wallow in the RFC archives.
>
> I think we should stop pretending that IETF creates some sort of model to
> follow, and analyse its performance and figure whether some other structure,
> merger, replacement, or set of improvements might be more suitable for this
> day and age.
>
> IETF was recently described on this list as a meritocracy. Is that a
> reasonable assessment, and if so, is that the sort of model for internet
> governance we wish to propagate?
>
> Again, I would like to see some decent analysis rather than the belief that
> since it has been with us since the good old days it must be good.
>
> Ian Peter
>
> PS one of the things that seems fairly standard in business management is
> that the sort of structures that work well for organisations in their early
> stages don't necessarily scale to mature and much more complex
> organisational needs, and radical change of structure is fairly normal
> evolution. We seem to resist that in internet matters.
>
>
>> From: Avri <avri at acm.org>
>> Reply-To: <governance at lists.igcaucus.org>, Avri <avri at acm.org>
>> Date: Tue, 22 May 2012 11:01:59 -0400
>> To: IGC <governance at lists.igcaucus.org>
>> Subject: Re: [governance] Enhanced Cooperation (was Re: reality check on
>> economics)
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I also do not have an analysis, but from 20+ years participation would say the
>> primary reason that capture does not happen is because people would not stand
>> for it. Over time there have been a few occasions when one large company or
>> other tried to ram its favorite solutions through the process. But by the
>> time the various WG and review process had been gone through it it was no
>> longer the solution that the large company tried to ram through. And that is
>> because people review seriously, do a bit of implementation testing, and argue
>> their issues freely.
>>
>> Another possible reason it works is genuineness in regards to ones opinion. I
>> have often seen the people from the same company arguing with each other in
>> the midst of a public WG meeting over the better path. Just try to imagine
>> two people from a single country or a single organization getting up in a
>> meeting and disagreeing with each other? And yet, that would be a healthy sign
>> in my view of having achieved a bit of maturity in the multistakeholder model
>>
>> Often people say that the IETF formula only works because it is dealing with
>> technical subjects but that it would not work in the policy area. I think
>> this argument is unproven and I don't beleive it. I think people assume there
>> is just one correct technological solution, but this is never the case. There
>> are many tradeoffs that must be made a long the way to a possible technical
>> solution and the outcome is by no means fated to a single possible solution.
>> I think the technical solution space and the policy solution space are not
>> inherently dissimilar in character and thus do not accept that it is subject
>> matter that make the IETF formula not work for policy issues.
>>
>> The main difference I find between the policy arena and the technical area is
>> the consistency of people's opinions. In technology, for the most part,
>> people beleive in the same technical solutions even after they change jobs.
>> In the policy area, people's views often change when they change jobs. In
>> tech people argue what they personally beleive while in policy people seem to
>> often argue what they are paid to beleive in. In the tech area, one rarely
>> gets a job because they picked one technical solution over another, while in
>> policy who you agree with determines who you work for and for many people this
>> means conforming their views to their potential employers.
>>
>> avri
>>
>>
>> On 22 May 2012, at 07:26, Norbert Bollow wrote:
>>
>>> Andrea Glorioso <andrea at digitalpolicy.it> wrote:
>>>> On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 9:59 AM, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> wrote:
>>>>> So I would suggest that the way forward will have to involve proposals
>>>>> of concrete substantive topic areas to be addressed by the "Enhanced
>>>>> Cooperation" process and its institutions, together with a strong
>>>>> commitment to seek, through true multistakeholder discussions, a good
>>>>> way to model this "Enhanced Cooperation" process on how things work in
>>>>> the IETF.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I may have misunderstood and/or missed something, but it seems to me you
>>>> are suggesting that there is something in the procedures of the IETF that
>>>> shields it from "undue influence" by "powerful stakeholders" etc. I am not
>>>> questioning this assumption (at least not right now) but I wonder whether
>>>> - assuming I have correctly understood - there are some analytical bases
>>>> to this assumption. Not the least because one may distill such processes /
>>>> characteristics and try to replicate them elsewhere (although I must say I
>>>> am by default unconvinced of the possibility to replicate the processes of
>>>> the IETF outside of the very narrow remit of the "organisation").
>>>
>>> Hello Andrea and all
>>>
>>> Alas I currently do not have any formal analysis. So far the only
>>> basis for my assertion is my own observations, as well as confirming
>>> anecdotical evidence that I have heard from others. However I am
>>> optimistic about the possibility of replicating this "robustness
>>> against undue influence attempts from powerful stakeholders"
>>> property in the context of other topic areas. In particular, I would
>>> suggest that the principles of openness of participation and rough
>>> consensus may be applicable quite broadly, while for the criterion
>>> of "running code", it will probably be necessary to figure out, for
>>> each topic area, a suitable criterion which has similar socioeconomic
>>> effects. I would suggest to look, for each topic area, for an informal
>>> criterion that provides guidance about when sufficient information is
>>> available among the participants of the discussion so that they can,
>>> as a group, make a reasonably well-informed rough consensus decision.
>>> Anyway, the principles that IETF is based on (absolute openness of
>>> participation, rough consensus and running code) are well-known and
>>> reasonably well-understood, at least by the people who have
>>> participated there.
>>>
>>> I would expect the big challenge to be in the area of convincing
>>> governments to give this kind of approach, with a suitable replacement
>>> for "running code" according to whatever is the particular topic area,
>>> a serious chance.
>>>
>>> What kind of analysis document would be helpful for that?
>>>
>>> Greetings,
>>> Norbert
>>>
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>>
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>
>
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