Subject: Re: [apps-discuss] Proposal for a Finance Area Mailing List

From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2012 15:00:30 -0400

> Is there any news from Area Managers regarding the status of the
> creation of the proposed list as previously advised?

The purpose of non-working-group email lists on the IETF servers is to
provide a place for discussion of things related to IETF work -- an
offshoot of existing work, perhaps, a proposal for new work that needs
some fleshing out, or maybe a discussion of issues that we think will
lead to new work some time later.

The ADs are not convinced that the work proposed here is best done in
the IETF, nor that it's likely to develop into something that kicks
off new IETF work later.  That view seems backed by most comments by
others in the discussion of the proposal on the apps-discuss list.
Walter has also said that there are a good number of participants
ready to work on financial protocols here, if only we would create a
list for it, but has shown no evidence of it, and all requests from
the ADs for such evidence -- in the form of actual posts from people
expressing interest in working on this here -- have been responded to
by statements, both on and off the list, that we can't reasonably
expect people to post here first, but that once we have a proper
mailing list, they'll show up and work.

Despite that, the ADs have been inclined to create a list and see what
happens.  But discussion at the Paris meeting continued the skepticism
from the community that such a list will do anything useful for IETF
work.  In addition, there were several outright objections to creating
the list.  Apart from concern about the resources spent in the
management of it, applications-area participants point out that there
are many places outside the IETF to get free mailing lists for
discussion... and there's a worry that an IETF list may simply be used
to claim that the IETF backs this work (which it doesn't, at least not
yet), and perhaps, worse, that it backs it in preference to other
related proposals.

Given the clear consensus in the Applications Area, the Applications
ADs have decided NOT to create the proposed mailing list.  We suggest
that the proponents use Google, Yahoo!, or some other free service to
discuss their proposals with their many interested collaborators, and
consider coming to the IETF with a BoF proposal or working group
proposal when things are more solidly defined and ready to start real
protocol work.

Walter:
We understand that you will not be happy with this response, but this
is clearly the consensus of the Applications Area participants and we
tend to agree with them. That said, we do want to add that many of
your messages, particularly the private ones to us, can best be
described as impatient and at worst, mean spirited, implying that any
refusal to create this mailing list only proves that the IETF is a
useless organization and that you'd simply "take your ball and go
home."  That's probably not the best way to gain the cooperation of
the community. We did set that aside (indeed, asking the rest of the
community, which was unaware of the content of our off-list messages)
and decided based on the potential benefits to the Internet and the
IETF, and the consensus of community.

Barry and Pete, Applications Area Directors

---

From: Walter <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2012 05:30:22 +0700

> Barry and Pete, Applications Area Directors

Thanks ("Barry and") Pete.

Certainly, this is an *extremely* disappointing result and one that is
in direct contrast to (1) previous communications (2) reasonable
expectations from the internet finance innovation community (3) the
IETF's own mission statement.

Before closing out discussions around the request it does
unfortunately seem, particularly given the rather extended and
unflattering characterization of my person and perspective that you
somehow thought to weave in to your response, necessary to raise a few
honest points of concern with your statements.  You will note that
these points will continue to be focused on the matter at hand rather
than personal character.

(Regarding your negative statements regarding my person, and it is
both regrettable for them to have occurred and - due to the nature of
the forum - for me to be obliged to comment further, I am happy either
accept your immediate and total retraction of all statements regarding
my character or agreement to publish the full contents of the limited
number of our off-list communications that you insinuate were in
demonstration of poor faith or character on my part in order to clear
my name for the public record - your choice, but promptly please.)

Firstly, the phrase "discussion at the Paris meeting continued the
skepticism from the community that such a list will do anything useful
for IETF work." is at odds with the IETF charter which commits to
providing a forum for technical matters relating to the internet
community.  The IETF charter is certainly NOT "to do anything useful
for existing IETF work" (this is so Kafkaesque as to be laughable, if
it were not so worrisome.  Consider "The disease which inflicts
bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine." -- John Stuart
Mill). More concretely, why should financial exchange continue to be
excluded from open consideration under the IETF whilst telephony,
messaging and other 'applications' are not?  No objection was made
when this question was raised earlier and in fact supporting
statements from IETF history were made.

Secondly, the phrase "resource spent in the management" seems almost a
joke considering how much time has been requested and willingly
volunteered over the past 4-5 months for the mere 'consideration' of
this matter.  To the observer it would appear that a mailing list runs
itself, and nought further has been requested.  If there is some issue
of financial or human resource relating to administration then surely
this should be detailed explicitly?

Thirdly, the phrase "there's a worry that an IETF list may simply be
used to claim that the IETF backs this work (which it doesn't, at
least not yet), and perhaps, worse, that it backs it in preference to
other related proposals." is nonsensical - there is probably a strong
case that the IETF has an identity crisis. Firstly, the IETF's own
documentation clearly states that there is no such thing as membership
of the IETF and that it is effectively participation driven, with
output being communications.  The IETF does not 'back' anything.
Opening a mailing list and inviting participation is akin to
requesting participation and perspective (and thus, "IETF
participation") from relevant parts of the internet community at large
(such participation is equally if not more transparent and valid than
discussion at physical meetings in particular languages and
timezones). As this has not occurred to date, the IETF community in
all likelihood cannot, should not, and will not claim any authority
within the internet financial exchange sphere *anyway*, so who in this
worrisome what-if world would care for their perceived backing?  This
whole point seems to be based on a premature and spurious question.
In fact, *it is only by engaging in transparent, peer-reviewed
discussions of exactly the type proposed - a mailing list hosted for
the greater community - that we, the volunteer community of
participants, can claim to have any authority of output whatsoever*.

Fourthly, the insinuation that "real protocol work" occurs only within
the IETF not only completely and demonstrably spurious but quite
frankly condescending to the internet community at large given the
nature of your response.

Putting aside the above, and looking at the path of this proposal over
the time since last December when it was initially made, perhaps IETF
procedures would benefit from some good faith review, since IETF
relevance to the modern internet community seems - at least from this
quarter - to be in the throws of being largely undermined.

Regarding the path forward for our proposed area of interest, the
various quarters of the internet finance innovation community with
which we have been in touch thus far will be forced to converge on an
alternate, non-IETF forum.  Whilst this could have been done months
ago, the expedient option was sacrificed willingly in order to try to
work with the IETF... an unfortunate but nonetheless well meant
decision that I for one am very happy to stand by in hindsight... even
if without mincing words it does rather seem that fair and democratic
ideals are being viscerally dismembered by bureaucracy while an
agreeable but disengaged audience idles nearby, engaged in the
discreet patter of polite conversation with the occasional raised
eyebrow and a glass of pleasant Parisian white, reaping the
comfortable benefits of prior social engagement.

To my mind, today is a sad day both for the internet community and for the IETF.

Yet consider...

"Tis better to have loved and lost
 Than never to have loved at all" -- Tennyson

and

"It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims." -- Aristotle

(Truly, one should never take oneself too seriously.)

Transparency triumphs in the end!

Walter Stanish
Payward, Inc.

PS: Development will continue elsewhere and an appropriate message
will be posted here once a venue is established, just for the record.
Cheerio for the moment, then!

---

From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2012 21:14:36 -0400

>> Walter:
>> We understand that you will not be happy with this response, but [...]

Crap.
The part that starts as above wasn't meant to be posted publicly, and
I screwed up.  I wanted to get the message sent before I went out, and
copy/pasted too hastily, including a part that I'd meant to send as a
private note from me (not from Pete) later.

Let me be clear that
1. that part was not meant to be posted publicly, and
2. that part was not from Pete and me together, but from me alone.

I'm sorry that it got sent publicly, and I'm embarrassed at my error.

Barry

---

From: Walter <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2012 09:09:36 +0700

> I'm sorry that it got sent publicly, and I'm embarrassed at my error.

That's rather interesting given that you were not privy to most
(earlier) communications.

Regardless, I am still awaiting either a retraction of your statements
regarding my character or an agreement to publish all communications
in order to resolve the accusations for the public record. Your
choice, but quickly please.

- Walter

---

From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2012 10:44:28 +0200

I sent Walter a private message.
I would ask anyone out of the IETF who wants to react to this message at all, to do the same.

Grüße, Carsten

---

From: Hannes Tschofenig <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2012 10:35:50 +0300

Hi Carsten, 

I don't know why we have to switch to private communication here. 

While I am still trying to catch up with the mailing list discussion. From the discussion I have seen so far I believe the usual "terminology" problem showed up here. 

The title "finance area mailing list" is probably the wrong term. Instead, we are talking about Internet payment protocols. There is nothing really magic about these protocols and we have to a certain extent worked on those type of protocols already in the IETF, as some of you had stated already. Even I had worked myself on a (failed) payment protocol (see http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jennings-sipping-pay-06)... Of course, they may not cover all the use cases Walter probably has in mind (and I do not fully understand the long list of stated functionality myself either). 

Nevertheless, there are various groups who are quite pragmatic and have started (or even finished) their work on payment protocols. I had been approached last year by some folks from the Web identity management community who wanted to standardize an OAuth based payment protocol. Sounds crazy? Not really. Facebook is using such a protocol with their 'Facebook Credits' (see https://developers.facebook.com/docs/credits/) and so is Google with 'Google Checkout/Google Wallet'.  Just recently the OMA had standardized their new payment protocol (see http://oneapi.gsmworld.com/payment-restful-api/) focusing on the needs of their telecommunication operator community. To my knowledge all these approaches use OAuth under the hood. 

I don't know how far these attempts are away from what Walter is trying to accomplish. I believe the main disconnect is in the understanding of how the process works in bringing work to the IETF and the lack of agreed terminology and scope makes is easy to talk past each other. 

Once getting to the point of talking about the same topic there are various other challenges, such as 
* who are all the stakeholders that need to be involved? 
* are these communities interested to bring their work to the IETF? 
* are they interested in a common standard?
* are there use cases similar or where are the differences?  
* is this work likely to hit deployment (given that there were some unsuccessful attempts in the past already)?
* why did various earlier attempts fail? 

[I am particularly interested in the last item given that we see a number of new efforts showing up these days.]  

Ciao
Hannes

On Apr 9, 2012, at 11:44 AM, Carsten Bormann wrote:

> _______________________________________________
> apps-discuss mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/apps-discuss

---

From: SM <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2012 01:23:52 -0700

At 00:35 10-04-2012, Hannes Tschofenig wrote:
>The title "finance area mailing list" is probably the wrong term. 
>Instead, we are talking

Yes.

This is not the ideal venue for discussing about the creation of a 
new (IETF) area in my opinion.

>I don't know how far these attempts are away from what Walter is 
>trying to accomplish. I believe the main disconnect is in the 
>understanding of how the process works in bringing work to the IETF 
>and the lack of agreed terminology and scope makes is easy to talk 
>past each other.

Agreed.

Although I do point people to the "Tao" and other process-related 
documents (see http://www.ietf.org/newcomers.html for a starter 
guide), it is not helpful to people trying to understand how the 
process works and to bring new work in the IETF.  Please note that 
this should not be construed as an opinion about whether person X is 
a newcomer or not.

>* are these communities interested to bring their work to the IETF?

The problem has turned into a catch 22.  There is a view that having 
an IETF mailing list would allow communities interested in bringing 
their work to the IETF to discuss and build support.  There is 
another view that by having such a mailing list, the IETF is 
"blessing" the work.

A mailing list allows focused discussions by a group of people 
interested in working on, for example, protocol X.  The absence of a 
mailing list does not hinder that.  One could look at this in terms 
of discussions.  If the volume of discussions is significant enough, 
it makes sense to move the discussion to a new mailing list if there 
isn't already one.

>* why did various earlier attempts fail?

Previous attempts have been about EDINT.  That is not the same as the 
problem discussed recently.

Regards,
-sm

---

From: "Tschofenig, Hannes (NSN - FI/Espoo)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2012 13:50:30 +0300

Hi SM, 

> new (IETF) area in my opinion.

I completely agree! That makes no sense. 

> this should not be construed as an opinion about whether person X is

Makes sense. 

> another view that by having such a mailing list, the IETF is

Yes, a challenging situation. 
> it makes sense to move the discussion to a new mailing list if there

I agree with you. 

> problem discussed recently.

I have not been involved in that specific effort. Cannot comment. 

>From a protocol point of view the topic seems pretty easy. Hence, the
problems must be somewhere else. I believe I know why the Internet Open
Trading Protocol failed. More focused attempts on the other hand have
been quite successful, for example, Diameter Credit Control.

Ciao
Hannes