[ih] Cluster Addressing and CIDR

[Andrew Russell]

>My experience is that formality creeps in primarily as the process 
>is abused.  The more it is abused the more necessary it is to make 
>rules about things where it could be assumed that good and fair 
>behavior would prevail.  As the stakes increase, that becomes less 
>the case. The only way for it not to happen is to work on things 
>that few people care about!  Either because they don't know it is 
>important or because it isn't!
>
>Take care,
>John

 From my research into the early institution-building of Internet 
standards (ICCB, IAB, IETF), it seems that another reason for 
building in formality is to allow open participation. As 
participation and interest grow, so too must the governing 
structures.  The history of ICCB, IAB, and IETF suggests that this 
sort of scalable governance was a key to the growth of the Internet - 
I've got a work-in-progress on some of this political and cultural 
history, a paper is available from   http://aconcept51.com/arussell/. 
I would love to hear comments, stories, etc if anyone's interested in 
contributing.

As for historians using Internet Drafts - anyone faithful to the 
Guidelines for Internet Drafts 
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf/1id-guidelines.txt will note that the first 
paragraph states:  "These documents should not be cited or quoted in 
any formal document."  That's pretty clear.  On the surface, I don't 
see any harm in looking up an old ID in a personal archive or on 
google, especially if it helps the thinking process.  We'll know 
things are getting out of hand when the lawyers come in and the IETF 
begins a RIAA-style crackdown on distribution of old IDs....

Andy
http://ucsub.colorado.edu/~russelal/