[ppml] Please respond to my petition

[Alec H. Peterson]

--On Friday, March 12, 2004 11:08 +0000 Michael.Dillon at radianz.com wrote:

>
> You are stepping awfully close to the borderline
> of abusing your position on the ARIN Advisory Council.
> You were not elected to tell people what they can and
> cannot discuss on the *PUBLIC* policy mailing list.

You know something Michael, you are absolutely right.  That is not what I 
was elected to do.

However, I did not do that.  To quote:

> The petition is out there.  You have already chastised somebody for
> responding negatively to your petition.  If people want to support it the
> instructions are out there.

To paraphrase, I merely stated that you have already made your petition 
public and it would be 'nice' to just let people weigh in on it without 
continuing to make the same points.  I made no comment or request based on 
the content of the actual discussion, but rather procedural issues 
surrounding the discussion.

Nevertheless, that in and of itself was probably inappropriate, and for 
that I apologize.  The AC has already weighed in on the issue and I should 
not have gotten involved again at this stage.  However, to continue:

>
> This list is for anyone and everyone who wants to
> air their views about ARIN's policies whether or not they
> are ARIN members or elected ARIN officials.

EXACTLY!!!!!

>
> And I didn't chastise anyone for responding negatively
> to the petition. I was trying to point out that there
> wasn't much point in getting into a debate about the
> policy at this point.

But you see Michael, by doing this you went and did exactly what you claim 
I did (tried to regulate the discussion on the list based on content).  It 
is no more your place to perform such regulation than it is mine.  The fact 
of the matter is that Steve's message was completely relevant.  I did not 
care for your comments and I should have responded directly to them instead 
of making a tangential point in another thread.

To your point two paragraphs up, the PPML is for discussions about anything 
related to public policy, regardless of whether or not it is related to a 
formal, numbered policy proposal.

So in conclusion, the fact of the matter is that nobody should be 
regulating the discussion.  Not you, nor I.  I want nothing more than to 
have a public policy process that gets participation from as many different 
parties as possible.  I did not appreciate your attempts to suppress the 
opinion of a well informed party, regardless of his stance on the issue.

Thanks,

Alec