Subject: RE: Trusting the IESG to manage the reform process (was: Re: Doin g t he Right Things?)

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 10:55:55 -0700

> This means that a good portion of the current IESG and IAB 
> are not in the
> inner circle.  It certainly may be true that some of the 
> younger folk are
> not part of the same affinity groups as some of the more experienced,
> but the mesh does include lots of folks under 40.

My own experience is that I have been involved in two major IETF efforts. In
each case the core of the younger engineering team has essentially left the
IETF space.

In the case of the HTTP effort it is perhaps not surprising that people
chose W3C over IETF, but why is that when the W3C is hardly untroubled by
bureaucratic process and in theory is a benevolent dictatorship?

The PKIX case is more mysterious still, some of the younger engineers still
appear at PKIX meetings, but the momentum has moved decisively to OASIS in
the space of less than two years. That is where all new commercial crypto
specs are going to be proposed in the years to come.

The issue is not who holds what office, the issue is whose opinion holds
weight and whose does not and even more so whose opinion is solicited and
whose is not.

The reason the engineers I referred to have left is that they believe that
there is no place for them in the IETF, their opinion is never going to
count for anything. 

		Phill