[Babel-users] [babel] A quick summary of babel at ietf

[Alia Atlas]

Hi Toke,

On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 8:31 AM, Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke at toke.dk>
wrote:

> Juliusz Chroboczek <jch at pps.univ-paris-diderot.fr> writes:
>
> > My feeling right now -- unless we f*ck up really badly, this is going to
> > be a productive and fun working group.
>
> I agree. One thing that I would like to emphasise from the meeting was
> the direction Juliusz set out for the working group (the "traditions"
> part of his talk, for those looking it up in the slides/video). I
> believe this is especially important for bridging the existing Babel
> open source community to the IETF process and working group.
>
> The two most important points in this were "work happens on the mailing
> list" and "running code required". While it was later clarified that
> there is no formal IETF rules imposing any of these on the working
> group, I believe they are fundamental for the kind of work we want to do
> here. So I will heartily endorse these principles and hope that we can
> build a working group tradition that builds upon them.


I agree that it was useful to have an open discussion about how we'd like
the WG culture to be and  have the WG run.  I found it useful to have.

I'd like to clarify a couple points here, however, since there are a few
subtleties.

First, in at least theory in the IETF, work always happens on the mailing
list for
working groups.  This is part of the formal IETF process.  Specifically,
all consensus
calls and decisions have to be done or at least re-done/confirmed on the
mailing list.
Juliusz did a fine job of emphasizing why that is the case - to encourage
participation of those who aren't
traveling, to allow those whose written English is more persuasive or clear
than
their spoken to more easily participate, to let technical points be seen
clearly
without regard to presentation skills, and so on.

Second, running code is great - but its lack shouldn't stand as a barrier
to writing
a draft or suggesting an idea.  A long time ago, the IETF Routing Area
required that
any standards-track draft have two independent implementations in order for
work to
proceed.   Bill Fenner and Alex Zinin wrote an RFC that removed that
requirement,
but it is still up to the Working Group Chairs to set policy for their WGs
as to when
drafts can progress out of the WG.  For instance, in IDR, it is still
required that there
are two implementations.  BESS just recently added a requirement for at
least one
implementation.

There can be a bit of a cycle where putting a feature in code makes it
harder to be
willing to change or update a draft based upon others' technical concerns.
It can
also be faster to write a draft, get improvements and agreement on the
idea, and then
go write code.  How this works can vary.

In the Babel WG, I think that there are enough motivated people that
testing ideas
out in code and discussing them will likely happen.  This is where setting
the culture
of the WG comes in.

Regards,
Alia


> -Toke
>
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> babel at ietf.org
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