Subject: RE: Plenary decision?

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2003 12:35:21 -0700

I am confused, are we in agreement here that there is no body that
is competent to decide this issue or not?

You seem to be arguing here that the plenary is not the appropriate
forum to discuss the issue, but that its 'decision' on the matter
should be respected even though nobody was aware that there was 
any decision being made.

What I am looking for is an open process. I do not see one.

And I do not think that the problem in this case is my dyslexia
although that is the reason why I choose this particular substantive
issue rather than another.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Friday, July 11, 2003 2:18 PM
> To: Hallam-Baker, Phillip; [email-masked]'
> Subject: Re: Plenary decision?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --On 11. juli 2003 05:32 -0700 "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" 
> <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> >> The closest thing we have is the IETF plenary. And it's been
> >> consistently  *against* any particular proposed change to document
> >> formast. If you don't  want to respect that - your choice.
> >
> > I seem to recall raising the issue in a plenary. At no time 
> was I aware
> > that the plenary was the decision maker for the issue in question.
> >
> 
> you snipped the text I was responding to.
> 
> You said:
> >> As for rough consensus, the PROBLEM I am identifying is 
> that there is
> >> simply no forum where the majority of the membership can 
> give their views
> >> on the matter.
> 
> I agree that the plenary is not a very good decision making body.
> But it IS the closest thing we have to a forum where the 
> majority of the 
> membership can give their views on the matter - and that was 
> what I was 
> saying.
> 
>                        Harald
> 
> 
> 
>

---

From: "Theodore Ts'o" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2003 17:30:47 -0400

> What I am looking for is an open process. I do not see one.

The plenary is the appropriate place to discuss the issue, and in fact
it represent a particular equine that has been bludgeoned to death
many times before, and will no doubt be bludgeoned to death many times
in the future.  As I said, I can't remember a time when the people
present who went up to mike to defend ASCII numbered less than at
least 3 times number of people who wanted to use some propietary
(i.e., MS Word) or non-editable (i.e., Postscript) formats.

Of course, the tools and formats keep changing, and although I
personally find Docbook to be infuriating because the tools all suck,
at least there are some open formats that actually have some promise
of providing better formatting for people who are must have
pretty-printed standards.  So certainly it's fair to hold repeat
equinocides from time to time.  

The current process is that the IETF leadership takes the input from
the plenary, and cogitates on it, and based on their determination of
community consensus, takes action.  Is it open?  It depends on your
definition of "open", I suppose.  No one took votes, so if a
democratic approach is the only way of determining openness, I suppose
it wasn't open.  However, there certainly was an opportunity to gether
community input, and at least in this case, I believe the overwhelming
community input was indeed respected.

So the question is whether or not the way this particular issue turned
out is a reason to indict the current process.  I don't think it is.
Give what I've seen of the people who have expressed their views at
the microphone, if we had a vote, it probably would have been
decisively in favor of ASCII.

					- Ted