Re: CONSENSUS: Contenders Should Negotiate
Dave Crocker (dcrocker@brandenburg.com)
Wed, 28 Feb 1996 08:22:06 -0800
At 1:52 PM 2/27/96, James M. Galvin wrote:
>How are we to accomplish this? Who is the proponent of which contender and
>why? What is the criteria against which we should create a harmonized
>protocol?
Jim, the contenders are MSP, MOSS, PGP and S/MIME. Their
proponents are whatever core "design team" (to use the IETF term)
self-organizes, with IMC providing a starter-set of names. Rather than
assume that we know who all those people are, we (Paul Hoffman and I) are
sending out initial follow-up messages to a small set of people whom we
believe are part of that core for each contender, asking them to
participate and to recruit others as they see fit. Each of the speakers
from the workshop, including yourself, are in that initial mailing. (If it
hasn't gone out yet, it will today; sorry for the delay.) We are taking
the set of speakers as a self-defining set of entry points into the 4
communities and asking the contact folks, such as yourself, to bring in
whomever else should, must, wants to participate.
Paul set up a closed mailing list for this combined collection of
people to use for their discussions. After the list gets going, its
actually handling will be according to the desires of those on it. We
decided it should begin by being closed to facilitate focus by the group.
They'll get plenty of diversity just by having the required range of folks
participate.
As to your question about criteria for a harmonized protocol, my
own view is that we hoping for portions to be harmonized. I'd guess that
politics, inertia, commercial interests, and even legitimate differences of
view about matters of policy and technology(!) will ensure that the efforts
do not all merge into one. The basis for the effort is the possibility
that such forces do not preclude greater commonality. The task, then, is
to find out how much is possible.
The defined process is, basically, to have this hybrid design team
attempt to develop a "proposal", over the course of the sequence of
milestones I listed, and have the rest of the community review and, ummmmm,
assist, in determining its reasonableness, utility, etc. As appropriate
this will produce proposals to feed into standards processes.
d/
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Dave Crocker +1 408 246 8253
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