Dear group members, For many years I've silently followed these discussions and now a project is emerging on which I'd like to ask whether any of you knowledgeable members might wish to help. The project starts in a different place but will inform your deliberations. Background: Two years ago I began a research project at the Harvard Kennedy School on "Pathologies of Public- Decision-making," to answer the question: Why do very smart and well-informed persons make decisions with catastrophic consequences, even though warned in advance-- and what can be done to mitigate this pathological behavior? The findings will be based on a series of case studies including the Iraq War and 2007/08 financial crisis (building on my earlier work on the Vietnam War). It turns out that decision-making processes in all these cases share structural similiarities leading to the adverse outcomes. As for us on this group, the decision process leading to the present rules for internet messaging seems to have strong resemblances to the other cases You are all smart and we were adequately warned in advance and all the way along (as this thread illustrates, and over the years I've monitored many dozens of threads like this one). But the result has been catastrophic: most messages are spam, with a heavy economic cost in terms of cleanup and prevention costs and the burden of fraud. So I will include a case study on the spam/abuse phenomenon and why so many smart people (like those on this and related lists I monitor) have produced such adverse outcomes. I am planning to complete my book manuscript next year and hope to be writing up this part of the draft early in '16. I invite anyone interested in commenting (or even working with me in writing this chapter) to send me a note off-list. To understand my approach please see the "Pathologies" page linked on my website noted below. Best to invest 10 minutes in viewing the MP4 file. A quick summary appears in the linked PDF but if you are not read into this type of analysis the elaboration in the spoken version will help a lot. My thanks in advance to any of you who find this of interest and might be able to help make the final result something unusual. Jeffrey Race, President Cambridge Electronics Laboratories Co-organizer, "Buddhism Rejoins the Great Conversation in India" Pune, India, November 22-24, 2014 (Centre for Buddhist Studies University of Oxford) International Center of Excellence --- University of Yangon (2014) "Introduction to Economics and Political Economy" (under auspices of School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC) Ash Center Fellow Harvard University (2012-13) +1 617 629-2805 086 709-7645 (follows me worldwide) (in Thailand) Current projects and forthcoming publications: <http://www.jeffreyrace.com> ****** "The Vietnam War as an Early Warning" <http://www.jeffreyrace.com/document/race_oh.pdf> ****** "Pathologies of Public Decision-making" informal title: "How Not To Be An American Blunderer" <http://www.jeffreyrace.com/tenmin/bonfire.htm> (Presented at Harvard University on 5/26/2015) On Tue, 3 Nov 2015 14:37:10 +0000, Brian Nisbet wrote:

On 03/11/2015 14:14, Gert Doering wrote:

...

Hi,

On Tue, Nov 03, 2015 at 01:49:18PM +0000, Sascha Luck [ml] wrote:

...

On Tue, Nov 03, 2015 at 07:13:17PM +0530, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:

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I would actually prefer any such proposal to come from within the regular RIPE community, rather than from one of us outsiders.

For once I agree completely. If this goes to an actual proposal, this needs to be in APWG as it would be:

a) address policy b) affecting the entire community

Any contractual changes will also need membership approval via GM vote anyway.

I'm not so sure about APWG. "Spending resources" is traditionally ncc-services-land, "combating abuse" is definitely anti-abuse-wg... so discussing the details here, and sending a heads-up over to APWG and ncc-services is good enough for me...

We're getting deep into minutiae at this point, but this is actually something I had planned to try and bring to the DB-WG and we'd see where we went from there. That said, I simply haven't had the time over the summer.

Suresh, your point is noted, however I was asking more for people to undertake to help, rather than to lead.

Ok, I realise I have said this before, but given the proximity of RIPE71 I will undertake, during that week, to iron out some of the important minutiae and figure out if DB remains the best place for this and go from there.

I would still love if there were more people from this working group who were willing and able to help with the drafting, of course, because that would help the whole thing along (and not let me get utterly distracted by my day job).

Of course if it is decided that AA-WG is the right place for such a proposal, I would have to re-evaluate my involvement, but we've mechanisms in place to deal with that.

Thanks,

Brian