[discuss] What is MSism?

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 05/04/2014 14:15, John Curran wrote:
> On Apr 4, 2014, at 6:59 PM, Pranesh Prakash <pranesh at cis-india.org> wrote:
> 
>> As I pointed out to some peers during a talk I gave on Wednesday, the only place in IETF where I see institutional affiliations as structurally present are in IDs, RFCs, etc.
> 
> Indeed - a necessary wrinkle in the system simply to aid in recognition of 
> the actual person contributing - if there were a better way which allowed
> omission of such, it would not surprise me if the IETF moved to it. 

Yes, that has been discussed, and there are certainly people who prefer
already to provide no affiliation on their attendee badge or in their
emails and documents.

That's why the question about governmental participants not only has
no answer, but it also has no relevance. As far as possible, the IETF
makes its technical decisions without considering affiliations.

It would be hypocritical to pretend that affiliations have no impact.
I listen more carefully to assertions about network operations from
people who work for important operators, for example. And we're not
stupid; we know that if 100 employees of BigCo have the same technical
opinion, and 2 employees of TinyCo have a different opinion, things may
be quite evenly balanced. Anyway, if somebody says "I'm from the
Government of Verybigland, and I want this bit to be zero", the argument
should be heard on its technical merits. That's especially important
if the next person says "I'm from the Government of Minute Island,
and we need that bit to be 1." (This hasn't happened, but not dissimilar
things have happened over both character sets and cryptographic
algorithms.)

    Brian