On 6/9/21 2:41 PM, Stephen Colebourne via tz wrote:
It would be clearer to place an explicit statement in the charter or theory file.
Sure, we could make this statement a guideline in the theory file (that's where the guidelines are) instead of just a NEWS entry. Would that do?
Country-based politics can be avoided by outsourcing the decision to ISO-3166.
That would help, but it would not be nearly enough. Country codes are not our biggest political issue, as witness our long discussions over how to spell certain entries, which city should be used in an area, when exactly some foreign power controlled some location, etc. The more unnecessary Zones we have, the more of these unnecessary discussions we'll have, particularly as the unnecessary Zones will be present purely for political reasons. (And ISO 3166 does have a country code for Kosovo, so even the country-code issue can and plausibly will be disputed.) Besides, we're better off the less we couple to the UN or to the ISO or whatever.
Once the premise is accepted that the backzone data is a meaningful part of the project
Nobody is saying backzone is meaningless. However, it doesn't logically follow that because backzone has meaning to some, it must be used by all; or even that backzone should be maintained to the same standard as the mainline data (which it's not). Being lower-priority isn't the same as being frozen: as I wrote last week <https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-June/030181.html> we can take good patches for 'backzone'. Goodness knows it needs them; it has too many errors and inconsistencies and unfairnesses. That being said, I urge potential contributors to focus on the mainline data instead, as we have trouble enough with there and our collective but limited resources are best focused there.