I’m struggling under the weight of my new found fame courtesy of the reg. Yes the witty person (sarcastic git) who responded to the reg’s poll to find America’s CTO was me.
My email is reproduced below.
“As you don’t provide Al Gore as a candidate to reinvent the internet, Siegfried and Roy are the only sensible option. Another alternative is a virtual CTO representing a hive mind of random editors. If only the IETF made RFCs available as anonymous wikis! They SHOULD do this.
Or a reality TV show where each of the candidates has to respond to various IT challenges like formatting a table correctly in Word or improving BGP. It’s a serious position so the selection process should be rigorous”
As an email subscriber to numerous IETF mailing lists I think my suggestion may not improve the efficiency of the organisation but it might give implementors who DELIBERATELY misinterpret the specifications for commercial advantage an excuse. They could simply claim “MUST” used to be “MAYBE”. Which leads me to mememoir.org which seeks to remove unattributable modifications which pollute the wikisphere. Neat idea. There’s an uneasy tension between preserving anonymity to protect well meaning truth promoters from pressure groups (for legal reasons I can’t think of any off hand) and protecting commercial puppets who use a public encyclopaedia as a platform for spreading rumours & FUD. (again for legal reasons, examples escape me)
Anyway, I’m off to sign autographs.
