> You don't have to convince yourselves. You have to convince the
> people in the room (whoever that might be) to the tune of rough
> consensus. That's the audience you're playing to.
I believe this captures the problem nicely and concisely.
It means that a substantial constituency from industry can organize to
solve a serious problem, can develop interoperable implementations, can
agree that the mechanism is an important component to solving that
problem, can obtain supportive evaluations as to the nature and
technology of the mechanism, but can be prevented from forming an IETF
working group if a random occurrence of folks with, at best, incidental
involvement in the topic happen to hum against it.
I don't suppose anyone else sees this as a thoroughly inappropriate veto
mechanism for forming standards for critical, global services?
<somewhat offtopic rant>
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The WG formation process in the IETF
is totally broken in just about every way possible.
The hum thing has two sides. The text you quoted describes one of them. The
other is that it is entirely possible for there to be a loud hum of assent and
no hum of dissent in the room without there being "the right stuff" for the WG
to actually get something done. I've lost track of the number of WGs I've seen
form with little if any dissent only to accomplish nothing useful, all too
often after wasting tons of time.
Of course the hum test depends critically on attendance. A hot button topic
(like anything relating to anto-spam technology) tends to draw in lots of
people who happened to have no other session to go to, many of whom have no
real expertise or competence in the area (but who may think, because they were
a sysadmin and ran a mail system back in college or whatever, that they do).
Alternately, an important but boring (or worse, misstated, misleading, or
incomplete) topic may only draw in the diehard faithful, resulting in no
obvious dissent to something the IETF has absolutely no business doing.
Simply put, the hum test measures almost nothing of value.
Next there's IAB oversight of WG formation. (I wonder how many people actually
know about the role the IAB plays here.) The IAB tries to send someone to every
BOF in order to be able to feed back commentary on the WG-to-be to the IESG.
Most of the time this works fairly well: A bunch of IAB members past and
present have taken this responsibility seriously and have provided sensible,
fair and useful input to the process. In other cases the assigned IAB has been
completely apathetic about the whole thing, which while not helping at least
doesn't cause serious harm. But others have used this as an opportunity to vent
about their pet peeves. In some cases this has been easily recognized as the
rubbish it is. But there have been other cases where it hasn't, and it resulted
in huge delays and/or a seriously suboptimal charter.
Finally, there's the IESG review and approval process. Most IESG processes have
checks and balances of some sort built in to them in order to prevent a single
AD from blocking stuff they personally do not like for no good reason. Document
reviews, for example, have hard timeouts, there's no way to vote "no", only
"discuss", and there's even an alternate voting mechanism that can be invoked
when things are truly stuck. But the WG approval process has none of this.
There are no timeouts and no way to override a lone dissenter short of a formal
appeal to the IAB, which an AD is unlikely to do (for obvious reasons).
I've told this story before, but it seems appropriate to repeat it here. The
situation with the IESG got so bad at one point a chair of a WG-to-be actually
got on a plane and flew from San Jose down to Los Angeles to literally ring my
doorbell and ask me to do something, anything to move the WG formation process
along. And I completely understood why he did it. That this happened is nothing
short of appalling. (In case you're wondering, the WG in question finally got
approved and ended up producing a bunch of RFCs.)
You'd think the problems with IESG review of WGs couldn't cut both ways, but
they do. I have personally seen sole dissenting ADs block WG formation and
receive little if any criticism from other IESG members beside the sheparding
AD. But in other cases I've seen ADs be attacked immediately for raising an
issue with a charter.
The hugely problematic nature of the WG creation process is the primary reason
I declined to be renominated to the IESG after four years of service, and why
it is likely I will never be willing to serve as an AD again.
Dave, a point you often raise is that the IETF doesn't pay enough attention to
issues of timliness and quality. I agree, and I believe the WG creation process
to be the perfect exemplar of what we do badly.
</somewhat offtopic rant>
However, as I indicated above, this is all fairly off topic for DKIM. The
process is what it is, and there's no chance it is going to change before
Vancouver. We must therefore have an agenda that reflects the process-that-is.
To this end, I see no alternative to spending a fair bit of time reviewing
things rather than getting work done. I would therefore suggest a charter
somewhere between what Barry has proposed (too much time spent on review) and
what you have proposed (too little time spent on review).
Ned
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