Re: IAB comments on draft-baker-liaisons-00.txt

[Fred Baker <fred@cisco.com>]

At 06:37 PM 8/15/2003 -0400, Leslie Daigle wrote:
> This seems to open the door to suggesting to other SDOs that they don't 
> need to interact with the IETF the same way as all individual participants 
> of the IETF -- through I-Ds.
Something you might want to carefully consider and have a good answer to:

The position of some in the IETF has consistently been that any 
communication from another body to us should use our communication 
mechanisms. Any time the ITU wants to say something to us, they should use 
an internet draft. That draft should be expressed as a flat ASCII file, in 
order to avoid proprietary formats, and have certain headers and trailers 
describing copyrights, status for usability as a source of text, and so on.

In all fairness, it would be perfectly reasonable for other bodies, such as 
ITU, to insist that any communication from the IETF to them use their 
communication mechanisms. Any time we want to say something to the ITU, 
including such memoranda as a reply to an internet draft posted by a person 
claiming to represent the ITU, we send a meeting contribution. A meeting 
contribution is a file in Microsoft Word 2.0 format, on the letterhead of 
the company that is a sector member of the ITU which we represent, 
representing the collective opinion of that company on a certain topic. The 
exact contents of the contribution are largely irrelevant, however, as it 
will not be directly referred to and cannot actually be counted on has 
having been read. Rather, the contribution serves as a ticket for a person 
attending the meeting to get an opportunity to make a presentation on the 
concept contained therein and participate in the midnight editing sessions 
from which the ITU document actually results.

Yes, I have worked in certain ITU processes to develop documents; I do know 
whereof I speak.

If we would not like ITU and others to make what we would consider 
outrageous demands on how we might communicate with them, it might serve us 
well to consider being flexible on the manner in which they communicate 
with us. Inflexibility on our part does not help build a productive 
relationship.