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Re: IETF areas re-organisation steps
2015-01-13 14:51:13
Thanks for the response, Alissa. Some comments inline.
On 1/12/15 5:50 PM, Alissa Cooper wrote:
Robert,
I’d like to share a few thoughts on the proposal to merge the upper layer areas
and then respond to your note below.
From my perspective, there are three issues that the merger helps to resolve:
1) Declining amount of work in the current APP area
2) Increasing amount of web-related work in the RAI area
3) Ongoing difficulty in finding multiple willing candidates to serve as TSV AD
for the last 5 years at least
To my mind fixing that third item in particular should be a key goal of the
re-org, and is the reason why leaving the areas largely as they are now, or
just merging APP and RAI without changing anything about TSV, is not a good
enough solution.
Furthermore, I think folks might be reading more into the three-merged-areas
proposal than is really there. The main benefits I see from an organizational
standpoint are threefold. First, in any given year we can ask the nomcom to
help us fill in the expertise gaps that exist on the IESG without being stuck
into rigid RAI/APP/TSV buckets. IMO, across those three areas there are certain
areas of expertise that absolutely must be represented on the IESG (or where at
least one AD has enough clue to appropriately leverage a directorate), e.g.,
congestion control, internationalization, web protocols, and job descriptions
could be tailored to make sure those areas were always represented while being
more flexible about what other expertise to seek out or accept.
So it's just a matter of circumstance that you're not throwing SEC into
the bucket. Nothing special about TSV other than "it's been hard to
recruit ADs for that area"?
Second, the ADs in the merged area can share WG responsibilities according to their
areas of expertise (just like the out-of-area AD proposal, except confined to the
three areas). There are plenty of groups in all three areas that could be just as
capably shepherded by any of the other five currently seated ADs — why create
artificial barriers to that?
That seems to argue for no areas at all, more than it does this
particular subsetting.
And it’s not obvious to me that this will require much more inter-AD conference calls
or coordination as has been suggested elsewhere on the thread. Granted I’ve only been
serving for less than a year, but as far as I can tell excessive inter-AD coordination is
only necessary when some crisis arises, not on any sort of regular basis.
Finally, the AD job can possibly obtain more appeal as something employers want
to support because the job has a slightly more general purview. An AD mostly
focused on transport might be able to pick up a web-focused group or two,
making the time commitment easier to justify and more appealing to an employer.
Again, that seems to be an argument for getting rid of the areas, and
isn't specific to this particular subset of areas.
All of these benefits concern the role of the AD vis a vis the area, not the other aspects of
“areaness” (scheduling, directorates, DISPATCH/TSVWG/APPSAWG, etc.). That’s why I
don’t think these other aspects need to fundamentally change.
More below.
On Jan 6, 2015, at 1:15 PM, Robert Sparks <rjsparks(_at_)nostrum(_dot_)com>
wrote:
I'd like to focus for a moment on another part of Jari's original message.
On 12/25/14 1:16 PM, Jari Arkko wrote:
Dear Community:
In October, we let you know that we would be coming up with some proposals
<trim/>
III. MERGING OF UPPER LAYER PROTOCOL AREAS
<trim/>
DISPATCH, TSVWG, and APPSAWG
would continue to function much as they currently do.
I see this as problematic.
RAI is currently operating following RFC 5727, where dispatch is defined. It is a consensus
document describing how the area decided to behave. It does not seem right to say _parts_ of the
new combined area will follow that consensus. How are you planning to avoid "well, that's
the APPs part of <newareaname> and we do things like this over there”?
Will it really be so much harder to avoid than it already is?
It will be different. I can't say "so much harder", but I can say that
you're trading one established set of ways for structuring discussions
off for some you'll have to invent. It may well be you find better ones.
We haven’t merged the areas yet, and yet we just went through this exact debate with webpush.
DISPATCH is the mechanism we use for dispatching real-time application work — I don’t
see the need to change that. There is fuzziness at the edges now, and there will be with a merged
area too. Nothing we do organizationally will rid us of the fuzziness.
If you're not planning to avoid that, then it's not really clear what problem
the organization is really going to solve - the resulting ADs will have to
behave the same regardless of their label.
I wish you had focused some of your response right here. I think the
essence of your response is that it will make recruiting ADs easier, but
that you don't believe it will appreciably change what they ADs actually
do. Did I get that right?
The arguments in the past about whether a group belonged in transport or RAI,
while occasionally silly, were _usually_ helpful in clarifying the problem that
the proposed group was starting to circle around. Some of the comments from
active TSV members have touched on aspects of this already. As proposed, we
will lose that tension, and I think we'll end up with muddier charters as a
result. (There are other ways to preserve that tension, of course, but we would
need to explicitly put them in place).
I have not personally found the “which area will this group live in?”
discussions to be useful.
Where I remember it being useful most recently wrt RAI and TSV was in
the _very_ early discussions working out the scope for the group that
ended up being rmcat.
And honestly there are lots of existing groups where the rationale for having
them in their current areas is just as weak/strong as the rationale for having
them in other areas.
That's not an argument for or against the proposal is it? (But it is
something that the IESG might poke more at - perhaps just moving some
groups between areas would have had just as much effect as assigning an
out-of-area AD?)
We’ll end up with muddier charters if the people involved in the chartering
let them become muddy, not if they have different area labels on them.
If the thought of developing something like dispatch-related parts of RFC 5727
to describe how a new combined area (whatever its ingredients) plans to operate
seems onerous, or too heavyweight, I'd take it as a warning that we're headed
for something unpleasant, or that has no real effect on organization, improving
the efficiency of making standards, making recruiting ADs easier, or reducing
AD load.
It’s not that it’s too onerous or heavyweight, it’s that it’s unnecessary.
DISPATCH works well now. The three items I listed above are not working well now, or could be improved. The
merger proposal tries to fix the things that are broken and leave the things that are working in their
current state.
I'm sorry, but I lose you at this point.
I don't see anything being fixed, given this argument, beyond perhaps
being able to recruit more ADs (and I find that questionable, but I
agree that it won't make it harder to recruit folks).
I do see you introducing an opportunity to make it more confusing for
people wanting to get protocol work done (which process in the new area
should they engage?).
I see it making it _harder_ for the ADs of that area (hopefully only a
little) as they work through that confusion.
Maybe there's easier on the other side of that, but it's not obvious
that it will be _significantly_ easier.
It occurs to me that one thing that might help add clarity to this
discussion is to see the description of the new area (as would be handed
to the nomcom for filling positions) written down. Has someone tried
that yet?
Until this message, I've been asking questions and pointing to potential
ramifications that it's not clear the IESG considered. I haven't been
trying to say "I support" or "I don't support" the proposal. I think
there's a way to combine the three areas that can work, but I think
you'll need to do more as part of that combination for it to not be
_more_ work for the IESG, even in the long run.
If the IESG proceeds with the proposal as currently written, the only
place I see it having a chance of really improving things is with the
possibility of attracting more ADs. I haven't seen anything in the
proposal that reduces AD workload (have I missed something?), which
makes the chances of attracting a bigger pool of candidates smaller. You
write above that "An AD mostly focused on transport might be able to
pick up a web-focused group or two, making the time commitment easier to
justify and more appealing to an employer." The hitch in that is that
this AD will be doing _more work_ than they would have done just as a
transport AD. The argument seems to be counting on the "web-focused
group or two" work being so much more valuable that these sponsors would
be willing to pay the TSV-time tax.
So, to be explicit - I don't oppose the reorganization, but I think you
need to do more work or the result will be somewhere between "no
difference" and "a little more work for the ADs than we have right now".
I'd again encourage writing down the area description as a good step.
Alissa
Rather than that, I hope we could fairly quickly come up with a good description of how
such a combined area would behave, and I hope that's not "just like the pieces do
now".
RjS
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