[rrg] making a difference

[Lan Wang]

Tony,

This is a very interesting discussion.  I have a couple of questions  
below.

On Dec 3, 2008, at 9:01 PM, Tony Li wrote:

>
> Hi Lixia, Michael,
>
>
> |>> (3) It's not up to us (or any central authority) which tiny  
> changes
> |>> get made
> |>
> |> if you are saying the Internet has no boss, then I agree.
> |> But I do believe that it is our job to understand what is  
> driving the
> |> trend, so that we figure out how best to influence or facilitate  
> the
> |> changes.
> |
> |Right, I think we're in agreement here, we just stated it a bit
> |differently -- when you say influencing and facilitating changes, I
> |think you mean what I meant when I said developing and
> |promoting new tools.
>
>
>
> I think you underestimate the power of the I*TF to help focus  
> techonological
> development.  If we, as a group, reach consensus on an approach and  
> start to
> implement it, then it carries an enormous amount of weight in  
> directing the
> rest of the industry.  Now, that does NOT mean that we get to  
> dictate the
> solution.  In fact, if we converge on something that the industry  
> things is
> a non-starter, then it's just wasted effort.

Could you explain what kind of things are non-starters for industry?

> However, the power of a
> consensus can cause thought to crystalize in one direction very, very
> rapidly.  Our deployment of CIDR is a perfect example of this.  In the
> course of about two years, we made a decision on how we wanted to  
> go, went
> off, wrote the documents, wrote the code and deployed it.  Done.
>

CIDR is one success story.  However, there are perhaps many more  
failure stories from I*TF and other standardization organizations,  
e.g. inter-domain IP multicast, .  They also had group consensus when  
they're developed.  So it would be great to learn some lessons from  
them.

A related note: I found the IAB draft " What Makes For a Successful  
Protocol?" (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-iab-protocol-success-04)  
quite informative.  Some of the initial success factors listed in the  
draft are "Positive Net Value (Meet a Real Need)" and "Incremental  
Deployability".

Lan


************************************************
Lan Wang
Assistant Professor
Computer Science Department
University of Memphis
Memphis, TN 38152

Phone: 901-678-2727
URL: http://www.cs.memphis.edu/~lanwang
***********************************************