While I won't add my vote to this issue for my own unrelated reasons I support this issue not because the IETF is undemocratic but because I think that LL really needs to do a lot more work before this is anywhere near ready to be put forward as a proposal for a standard.

The JIRA is definitely imperfect. That's why long ago, I filed a proposal to separate Features from the bug-tracking JIRA, as the JIRA was never intended to run a diverse community democratically, and if it is intended for some kind of governance model for all of real and virtual life, then it's a very totalitarian one that needs to be overthrown.

Sure, you can only vote yes for a Feature, as if you are in the Soviet Union. But that's better than nothing, and leaving it to the hummers in hive mind as at the IETF.

But if you want a technical literalist answer, let me explain once again what will be "fixed": the lack of democratic voting in the IETF.

Do you realise that if you were around in 1991/2 or so and blocked Tim Berner-Lee's efforts to get the HTTP/HTML protocols of being standardised by the IETF, there would be no World-Wide Web today?

Do you realise that if Philip and other didn't go to the IETF to standardise the streaming audio and video protocols on the Internet, you wouldn't be able to do your podcasts, Philip would probably never dreamed about using streaming for Second Life, and none of us would be here discussing this?

Do you realise that it's thanks to the standards created by the IETF that the Internet is around for the past 40 years, allowing 2 billion devices to communicate with each other, and probably many more in the future?

Guess what, Prokofy. After June 2010, I seriously will encourage Linden Lab to standardise the Open Grid Protocol not only at the IETF, but go further on to the IEEE and the ISO, which are even older organisations, and even "less democratic" — anyone can join the IETF, for instance, but the IEEE is only open to engineers for example.

I think you're terribly misinformed by what "standard bodies" actually are for, or how standard-enacting organisations work. I would definitely take some more time to read them in full. And try to understand that technical standards have been done this way for the past 125 years (IEEE), 60 years (ISO), or 40 years (GADS/IETF).

And yet you might criticize EU privacy laws and people criticize your country's loss of wages and imports after joining the EU and many think the EU didn't do enough to stop the war in Iraq – are they mad?! Don't they care about Czechoslovakia, cheese, and consolidation – and serious loss of life in Iraq? They shouldn't ever, ever criticize any standards-making body because standards-making bodies always know best!

Gwyn, I'm awfully glad that you are feeling a sense of outraged entitlement on the encroachment of your special technical domain because it helps point up my case even more starkly.

Your claim about the IETF standards making it even possible to "have" an Internet are exaggerated, and would face debate even by your fellow tekkies. The making of standards didn't bring the Internet into being, there were all kinds of other motivations, from military, to business, to educational.

If the IETF played a role then that is no automatic mandate for it to play a role now It's not the only body making these claims, and there are others as you well know. Here's a good comparison and critique of the governance issues:
http://www.internetmark2.org/study/Governance_analysis.html
Whatever the agenda of the people writing this page is, they make a good point, that governments will not want bodies that do not answer to them ultimately to make decisions that affect them – and governments that are representative democracies are absolutely right to want this.

You seem to believe that just because some standards body is "necessary" or "did a good job" in the past that a) it will go on doing so b) we can't ever criticize its oppressive methods of governance. That's not scientific, Gwyn, nor liberal.

If virtual worlds become of more commercial and political value than they are now, guess what, you can huff and puff all you want about 2010, but governments and interngovernmental bodies like the ITU will fight with engineers' bodies if they undermine their interests.

There's a geek received wisdom that wresting Internet governance out of the hands of the one government actively involved in its development – the U.S. – was a good thing. Generally, everyone concedes that you don't want a free space like the Internet to be the property of one power. That makes sense. But what if the body that takes over then becomes unaccountable? That there isn't even the liberal democratic government of the U.S., with its insistence on free speech, free press, freedom of association to overrule the inevitable autocratic tendencies of coders? Then what? Ought we to ask for government to step back in, and this time perhaps some intergovernmental body? That's going to bring a whole new set of difficulties, but if the issue comes down to whether people in virtual worlds can have certain features like protection of IP, and these bodies don't serve that interest, they will be moving aside. Two words I keep repeating: Facebook TOS.

The battle for digital implementation of intellectual property was waged and lost in the first iteration of the Internet, because of concerted lobbies. One could argue whether it was right or wrong for that stage, but what you can't avoid is another battle over the same thing again. You cannot assume a win this time when there are now corporations at stake who are larger and have more users and are more aware than the first round of the Internet.

I think you're terribly misinformed about what standards bodies are for Gwyn or how standar-enacting organizations work. They work by consensus of free peoples, and representative democratics and mandated governments and intergovernmental agencies are still preferrable to a group of humming engineers. Try to understand that governance standards have been formed this way for hundreds of years, most recently in the United States (1776) or the European Union (1993).

One thing that you learn at the very beginning when studying science and the scientific method is that science is NOT a "bikini contest" where you vote for the opinion you like most, and the one winning the vote becomes "science". Democratic processes — as in "the majority will decide what is right or wrong" in science — are simply unheard of in the field of scientific research. You don't make scientific decisions based on popularity, a vote, or "the citizen's majority will". Similarly, you don't make scientific decisions by committees including people with little or no knowledge about the subject. Technology and engineering — the application of science to solve a particular problem — are also not done by "popularity contests", but by application of scientific knowledge to a particular area or field according to the training, experience, and good sense of an expert.

You're simply perverting the whole discussion by deliberately mixing up two levels: politics and legal systems on one side; science and technology on the other. Sure, they're intermixed, and will always be. But science and technology are ideological neutral — it's their use that is to be regulated and mandated by governments. Preventing the advancement of science and technology in the name of ideology is falling back to obscurantism and the fear of technology — a Luddite attitude that I certainly would never have thought you'd be defending!

When you get politics and ideologies mixing up in the scientific area, you allow people to teach children creationism in schools for the sake of transparency and equal access to all types of "opinions". But scroll back to the pre-Illuminism days, and you'll see the results of ideology perverting the advancement of science and technology at all levels. We were supposed to have left that behind, at least, as you say, since 1776...

Oh, and for the sake of argument, without the IETF, the would not have been an Internet as we know it; we would still be in the mid-1980s with lots of isolated networks from several different vendors. The IETF, ironically, was created because the "serious" organisations — the ITU you mention, the IEEE, the ISO — did not think the emerging Internet was worthy of their attention. I'm sure that these days mentalities changed a lot at those other standardisation bodies, and, in fact, it's hard to see a RFC emitted by the IETF that doesn't become, after a few years, a standard by the other bodies. I'm not defending the IETF with nail and teeth — like I won't defend any other standardisation body, since they come and go — but just that without standards, there would NOT be an Internet as we know it.

And also for the sake of setting the record straight, the Internet as we know it — the set of protocols defined by the IETF — do NOT worry about the "legality" of the Internet. They do not set ideological policy in its protocols — that would be as stupid as insisting that, say, a power plug of 110V or 220V cannot be installed until it is never used to provide energy to a photocopier (which is a device able to violate intellectual property rights). Protocols define how technology is to be used in order that systems from different vendors interoperate; laws mandate how those systems are allowed to be used by people (ie. using a photocopier for violating intellectual property rights is a crime).

There is no "win" or "lose" this way, Prokofy. This is not an ideological fight to see who gets the most supporters and "wins the game", you just make it so to suit your own agenda. Instead, it's about interoperabilty across competing vendors versus a closed environment. Imagine a world where you'd have to buy a different type of petrol for each brand of car; a different washing machine depending on who supplies power to your home; a different radio set to tune in to different radio stations; a different mobile phone if you switch operators; and so on. From a consumers' point of view, the triumph of industrial advancement in the 20th century (as opposed to what happened at the start of the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century) is that parts are interchangeable, that devices plug in to the same sockets, that products from competing vendors work with each other. The consumer has benefitted from interoperability thanks to standards that allowed that. For virtual worlds, what a world-wide standard means is that you can pick your preferred company to do business with — be it Forterra, Linden Lab, IBM, or the gang of kids across the block — and all will allow you to connect to the same metaverse of interconnected grids. Similarly, for content creators, it means that they can develop content on one grid, and seemlessly offer the same content for sale on other grids — without needing to worry about developing everything from scratch just for a specific vendor. Producers and consumers of content will be drawn to a "compatible" metaverse just because the amount of content to be offered — and the amount of money made out of that content — will be made on compatible metaverses, that's plain and simply what a standard protocol allows.

I hopelessly try to understand what standardisation (defining how plugs fit into sockets) has anything to do with Czechoslovakia, cheese, or war in Iraq.

You know, Prok and I have a lot of disagreements, and though I disagree with some of hir points on this issue, I have to say this is so wrong minded.

That "geek wisdom" Prok cites is the reason you have Second Life, Gwyn – it's the reason the Internet isn't restricted to .gov, .edu engineering schools, and .com sites that represent big government contractors. If you want a political history of the Internet, you must absolutely acknowledge that we would not have anything like the net we know and love without a group of cooperative anarchic geeks taking control of the net, sometimes by coercion, from the hands of (mostly US) government.

I would recommend that you go back and study... "governance," in this case, isn't Prok's term but the IETF's. http://www.internetmark2.org/study/Governance_analysis.html

That said, I question the concept of giving virtual world standards to IETF – or really, more specifically, SL standard to them. Linden Lab has never been an efficient engine for governance in-world, but the issue of governing standards is very different from governance of in-world affairs. What we are talking about here is if we want an open committee of folks with financial interests in There and Google and Microsoft and Apple and the US Navy, as examples of stakeholders, defining the future shape of virtual worlds.

It is my opinion that handing IETF our standard for development will produce less open, less creator-friendly, more government- and corporate-friendly results. This is because IETF business doesn't just occur online, it also has a critical component at conferences, held several times a year, rotated between continents. In the modern IETF, what this means is that moneyed interests can send representation to these conferences, and ordinary folks like you and I are cut out of the off-line diplomacy.

This has proved to make the IETF, in many cases, a snarl of corporate and governmental politics where the voice of the creator/user/everyday programmer is dwarfed.

Particularly, the beginning stages of establishing standards can include times of flux, lack of functionality, and compromises where on a tacit basis, everyone loses because no one can be allowed to "win."

I have been working on the Internet since 1982 – I am probably one of the first 50 women engineers to work in this field, according to Vint Cerf. I have watched this environment grow up. And although I don't agree with every part of Prok's rhetoric, the general gist is, we need a lot more awareness and discussion before we hand grid standards to folks like There, who are focused on proprietary content for the military as a source of mainstay income, and whose priorities differ wildly on openness, permissions, autonomy, security, and many other details that you should care about.

I think the point you are missing, Gwyn, is that the "experts" who can afford to participate make the rules, not the experts in the field. IETF is open to anyone who can afford the time (and travel) – and folks with financial interests who differ a great deal from yours will pay a geek a full salary and travel to forward their niche interests.

IETF is no more "open" governance by experts than the US Senate. Perhaps less so in some committees. The lobbyists often buy the vote.

For an historical example of Internet governance by committee, here's a short snippet: http://www.rkey.com/dns/overview.html or you can pick up books on it. Or you can start at the Berkman Center and explore. There's a lot out there, a lot of history, and much of it will give you pause if you think that the experts generally win over the politicians and corporate interests.

It is for these reasons the decision of LL to hand over standards trouble me, even though I am in favor of open standards, open source, and transparency.

I hope that the people who make this decision – which will be LL not us – will consider all the aspects. As far as I know, Mitch Kapor is the only person involved with LL with the historical perspective to really understand the evolution of the standards process and how it will or will not serve this.

But it feels like something our community should care about and discuss. And it is, very much, a strategic technical decision with the potential to change every technical aspect of what we discuss in the Jira. Ultimately technology serve purpose, and the purpose – the implicit expectations we have of SL – set priorities in the Jira and make this a technical topic worth discussing in the developer/user community.

There are, however, still some good reasons for LL to change their standardisation process. The Architecture Working Group wasn't really going forward with its work on the Open Grid Protocol. It's pointless to attach "blame" to it at this stage. The group that actively participated was small — as it's usual on those things. A large part of the group wanted a quick turnaround of implemented functionality. It was clear that both IBM and Linden Lab were more keen in figuring out how to establish policy in interconnecting grids, and that was the most important aspect of the OGP. One person was totally against the mere existence of the AWG or even the OGP from its very start. The remaining 17 million residents, active or not, remained clueless about the whole process.

So by merely "being a part of it" — a very open group, absolutely informal, where anyone could join and give an opinion — was obviously "political". LL and IBM had one motive for discussing the OGP — protecting policy when interconnecting grids. A group of developers wanted "quick solutions". One person wanted the whole concept to be abandoned. Those are political issues in the sense that "when two people meet to decide the fate of a third one, that's politics". So even on a very small group, there is always "politics" and lobbying.

Also notice that the many interest groups in the OGP were never present at the AWG discussions. You didn't get land barons; content creators; or metaverse development companies (with the exception of IBM...) on the discussions. Most simply don't care. The few people that did care obviously appeared. But the meetings were not only not secret, but they were published, promoted by LL on their own blog (and others), and general attention was drawn to the process. Still, "the voice of the creator/user/everyday programmer" was not there. And after 16 months that's quite symptomatic of something not working well.

Pushing the development process into the IETF will obviously not get rid of the politics — it will only get worse — but it will have two major advantages: first and foremost, it'll create an international, open standard as a result. The timeline is set, and the goals are clear. Sure, the standard can fail (if there's not a consensus), but in most cases, it won't. And secondly, it applies a methodology to make sure that the standard has the expected levels of quality. This requires formality, a process, and guidelines — that have worked well since 1969; after all, we can all look at the results: 2 billion users on the Internet. Those two points — recognition of the standard world-wide, beyond LL's own user base and their fans; and applying a methodology to get results — are, for me, what the AWG lacked so far in attempting to get the OGP standardised "on its own".

And of course the IETF is also open enough to listen to "the voice of the creator/user/everyday programmer" if they care to join the discussions — most, however, never will. With your 50 years of experience, watching the Internet grow from start, you have seen that the few people who meet at any standardisation board are the ones that are really interested in it — which is almost always a tiny group, compared, of course, to the vast number of Internet users.

Then we have the whole aspect of... drama. Your link about the DNS wars is a good historical example, and yes, of course there are more. OpenDoc might just have been on of the last (with a "tie" between Microsoft and the standard — Microsoft refused to adopt the standard, while the rest of the world's governments adopted it formally, without, however, being able to count on Microsoft to provide software that uses it) — but I'm sure you can find more examples, even outside the software/Internet world. All the standardisation bodies talk about "generating consensus" but that is just a noble goal: the reality is always quite more dirty. Why should we be surprised? Again, that's just human nature at play: we cannot eradicate human nature and expect standardisation bodies to be Holy and Pure. So long as humans are part of the process, humans will always act as humans normally do.

I notice that you regretted the lack of that "geek culture" in the adoption of a world-wide standard, while interestingly Prokofy defends the complete opposite — getting rid of the "geek culture" when implementing any standard. I obviously find the term "geek culture" offensive. All professions have their "culture". Engineers have been geeks since they became engineers — but that's not different from how architects behave, or doctors, or journalists (or even politicians!), when they're in their own group. What's wrong with that? The affinity that one has towards one's field of expertise makes one become a "geek" in that field, be that a scientific/technological field, or one on the social sciences, or on literature. That's just another part of our human nature, to bond with people with similar backgrounds. Throwing the "geek culture" as a weapon — either to push it to glorify certain technological achievements (like the Internet) or to minimise the role of engineers and experts in defining how technology should work for the greater good of all is simply "labelling" a group without adding valuable insight (vulgarly, "name-calling" or "trolling" with no other purpose but to anger those who feel offended by the usage of the term).

No, my point was totally different, and it was to emphasise that technological decisions ought to be made by technology experts, and that policy decisions should be made by politicians and lawyers ("policy-setters").

If you're saying that the IETF is a forum where both policy and technology comes into play, and that policy usually wins over technology, I'm fine with that — so long as the specifications, by itself, are technologically sound. What they're used for is for the general public to argue about.

Sure, if your point is that the IETF might not have been the best body to submit the standardisation of the OGP, because, of all available standardisation bodies, the IETF is the most corrupt (in the sense that votes get bought), well then I might agree with you, and I would ask you what standardisation body would guarantee a lower level of corruption. Then we might argue, even if just a posteriori, if LL made a good decision or not.

The rest, well, is simply discussing ideologies and philosophy. For that, I go to my local Buddhist group — and not to the JIRA.

Minimizing the role of geeks in technology is desperately needed as a correction to their exaggerated overinvolvement in technology that affects many people, but about which they have no say as geeks have dominated the development process.

It seems IETF may not have been the best body; and the group of corporate and government interests that immediately coalesced when MMOX was formed also is indicative of real problems. The Metaverse has to remain free, like the Internet. It isn't geeks who keep the Internet free; it's actually a mixture of governments – gasp, yes, governments – and users, most of whom are NOT geeks.

The proposal is precooked but half-baked – a plot by a small group with an agenda to throw interoperability their way, but without enough groundwork down to obtain consensus, understanding, and support within SL and outside it.

Let's dissect the Summary:

Linden Lab Should Not Take OGP to the IETF...

This has already been done. Time machines have not been invented yet to undo this.

...Because It is Not Democratic

Correct, so nothing said on this JIRA will change whether it will be approved or not anymore, you are "preaching to the choir" as they say.