Subject: [Gendispatch] Comments on draft-gondwana-effective-terminology-01

From: "Livingood, Jason" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2020 20:14:32 +0000

(personal views - no hats)
I read draft-gondwana-effective-terminology-01 and here are some comments FWIW.

Section 2.2.  Words can encourage or discourage participation
- I like your discussion of the value of diversity and looking at encouraging & discouraging signals.

Section 4.1.  Engineering considerations take priority
- Your points are fair enough I suppose, to not be swayed as fashions change as you said. But I think it’s also sometimes the case that sometimes change can come quickly. So just because a change of perception or interpretation occurs recently does not mean we should not pay attention or react to it and consider it.

Section 4.3.  Decentralised control
- You write that "Final term choice always rests with document authors." But in WG documents the documents really become the WG's, we have IESG review that may seek changes and of course the RFC Editor process (not to mention the Last Call process). So speaking as an author of documents myself, after something became a WG item I had less control over changes because it was a reflection of what the WG desired or chairs directed, etc.

6.  Security Considerations
- I suspect this is the section that will elicit the most comment and reaction from reviewers. I might suggest this is in part due to putting these concerns here in a Security Considerations section rather than some prior section called "Potential for Process Challenges" or something like that. I recommend moving it out of Security Considerations because the concerns you raise don't appear to pertain to security.
- In terms of the content, I am unsure it is particularly challenging to establish that the use of 'master-slave' raises issues that could not easily be avoided by using 'primary-secondary' for example. And in my experience - probably like yours - I've seen plenty of spurious technical complaints raised in the normal process of developing a document in a WG, most of which on all sides are often hard/impossible to prove or evaluate. But usually the IETF process, left to work as designed, sorts this out reasonably well, messy though it appear in the moment.

Thanks
Jason