[address-policy-wg] 2015-05

Dear Gert, Sander and others who responded either in private or in public,

(more meta discussion)

> On 23 Oct 2015, at 18:11 , Gert Doering <gert at space.net> wrote:
> 
> Hi Remco,
> 
> On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 01:08:03PM +0000, remco van mook wrote:
>> While I applaud your willingness to provide a platform to any and all
>> policy proposal regardless of its merit, I must now strongly encourage you
>> to start reconsidering this approach or to start actively moderating
>> discussions on this mailing list.
> 
> As much as I value your wisdom and contributions, *this* we totally
> cannot do - that is, decide "by order of the chair" which proposals
> have merit or not, or moderate the list (except in extreme cases).
> 

I think you already do - not consciously, maybe. And for years that has worked to mostly everyone’s satisfaction. What I do note is a general unwillingness to have any discussion that’s not part of the PDP (for those of you who are unfamiliar with it, you can find the most recent version here: https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-642 <https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-642> ). I understand that the PDP also very much functions as a safety net for the chairs as long as they follow it closely, but at the same time the chairs have been selected by the community itself because of their capabilities to lead a working group - so please, lead. That’s all I’m asking.

Some people remarked that it wasn’t my place to make these comments, but given a lack of other people to stand up and say something, I consider it my obligation to this community that I’ve participated in for quite some time now to do get up and draw a line in the sand. The standards of discourse on this list (and I do appreciate a good bit of banter as much as everybody else) are causing people to either stay out, or walk out. How you fix this is up to you, but it is something that needs fixing, quite urgently. I would have left this list already if it wasn’t for some morbid sense of obligation. The argument “this is a mailing list, deal with it” would hold merit if the list had no formal purpose. As is repeated at the beginning of every single AP session at a RIPE meeting, this is the place where policy gets made, and consensus is reached. And nowhere else.

> We do our best to focus the discussions and do call people to order if
> needed - OTOH, there are so many aspects to this particular topic (like:
> is there a real problem with IPv6 in Iran or not?) that it's not easy
> to declare something to be totally off-topic - and in particular, the
> argument "just stop wasting all our time on IPv4!" has been brought up
> before, and I can well see the merits of *this*.
> 

I wasn’t talking about this topic in particular, although any discussion about how the final scraps of IPv4 are handled seems to bring out the worst in people. I’m very interested to hear about corner cases within our region where certain pieces of community policy are disallowed by local regulation or legislation, but the answer to those is not to then rewrite policy for the entire region. The RIPE region consists of, give or take, 76 countries and there’s no way we could accommodate every quirk or oddity.

As for “Let’s stop talking about IPv4” - I think that’s too sweeping a statement to agree with. The focus, in my opinion, should have moved away from IPv4 a while ago but it’s impossible to tell if there’s not some corner case we might have forgotten about, Stating “Let’s only talk about IPv6 from now on” on the other hand als creates an interesting conflict with another working group of the RIPE community. Maybe we should think about a reshuffle?

> So, what do you want us to do?  Disallow any discussions that touch
> IPv4, or have operational / monetary impact on people's networks?  This
> would harm our open process much more than the occasional discussion
> that strays quite far from the original topic.
> 

As David remarked in his (otherwise very off-topic but brilliant post) we’re no longer in 1998. The impact of what happens in here is also a lot bigger: a potential multi-billion euro market for IPv4 transfers was created in here, other policies that reached consensus cost the industry as a whole tens of millions of euros in order to comply. I don’t think it’s too much to ask to have some observed rules around how discussions are being held in here. IETF working groups have a concept of drafts that are accepted by the working group to work on, that would be something to consider. RIPE meetings have a code of conduct these days, that’s maybe another thing.

> 
> (But anyway - Remco is right of course that some of the "contributions"
> to this discussions are *so* totally off-topic that even a very liberal
> interpretation won't find any useful content in there - like, signature
> flames going to the whole list - so, please refrain from adding extra
> noise to the discussion.  You know who you are…)

Amen.

Kind regards,

Remco




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