Re: "De facto charter" proposed text

i am obliged to comment on a certain characterization:
    
> The ADs appointed a design team dubbed the "Group of Nine" or simply "The
> Nine" consisting of 3 persons from each of the three camps, and tasked them
> with determining what the core mechanisms were that they could all agree on.
> The goal was to define some common information that would allow some kind of
> interoperability of the different protocols, even if a single protocol was
> not possible.

the phrase
    
    some kind of interoperability of the different protocols
    
is misleading at best. its use does however explain why the working
group "has fallen and can't get back up".
    
the mandate of the nine was to produce a specification for
    
    minimal gateway semantics
    
each of those three words conveys a very careful scope. the current I-Ds
before the WG are thus out of scope, three times over. to explain why, i
will quote from a message i sent to a different working group earlier
this month:
    
>> let's admit that an unfortunate decision was made at the december, 2000
>> meeting of the impp working group. that was the meeting where it was
>> decided that cpim was going to go from minimal interworking to
>> supporting things like e2e encryption.
>>     
>> at the time, i doubt that the people in room understood the
>> ramifications of their decision. i'll speculate that most people thought
>> they were just adding something useful. very few people probably
>> understood that that decision implied a fundamental architectural change
>> to the work that impp was doing: going from an interworking
>> specification to a new instant messaging specification.



> A crucial omission at this stage was that IMPP's charter was not updated to
> reflect the changed circumstances.

on this, i most certainly agree.
    
the lack of a concrete, updated charter has allowed the WG to behave in
an aribtrary fashion with respect to its choice of technical goals and
the soundness of the engineering decisions it has made. this explains,
for example, why there is no rationale as to why certain impp things are
required by cpim, and others aren't.
    
certainly, there is a lot of blame that can be assigned here. perhaps,
as the instigator of the nine and the editor of the original documents,
i should have clearly enumerated the three-word philosophy in each
document. perhaps the WG chairs should have demanded that the ADs
approve a new charter before embarking on a 30 month odyssey. perhaps
the ADs should have demanded it. perhaps the IESG should have caught it.
i don't know.
    
what i do know is that the WG has, in effect, been operating without a
coherent charter for the last 30+ months, and the results reflect this...
for example, it is no longer clear who the intended constituency really
is; in fact, there is a strong argument that the Internet has moved
beyond there being any practical consituency.
    
although proposing a "de facto" charter is one way of legitimizing the
WG's behavior, i believe that the ADs would be well served by returning
to first principles and asking themselves whether the WG has adhered to
architectural and engineering principles that are sound, and whether
there is a reasonable basis for believing that this work will get
serious use on the Internet.
    
/mtr



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