At 09:08 PM 4/16/2002 +0100, Graham Klyne wrote:
At 08:14 AM 4/16/02 -0700, Dave Crocker wrote:
Query to the group: If we believe we should not hold working groups to
their milestones, why bother to have those milestones?
I think there's a useful middle ground between slavery to milestones and
completely ignoring them.
There is a view of working group charters that they are a contract between
the working group and the community. As such, there is an argument in
favor of respecting milestones diligently. The the details of the
milestones are part of the basis on which the IESG approves the group, so a
working group's failure to meet the dates is, by definition, a failure to
perform.
The piece of flexibility that you probably mean is that slippage happens
and we need to deal with it constructively.
The normal way that is done in the rest of the world is to renegotiate the
milestones. This, of course, first requires paying attention to meeting
milestones. Since we largely do not do that, now, it would be a large
advance in working group management to just pay attention.
But (to be clear) I'm not sure that there's really anything here that
calls for a change in the rules so much as maybe engendering a slight
sense of urgency. Sometimes, it's appropriate to nag folks to deliver on
their promises in timely fashion (and I know I'm not entirely innocent of
needing such prodding, on occasion).
Given current IETF cultural norms about meeting milestones, starting to
take them seriously would constitute a very large change.
I started this thread trying to point out that we can deal with aggressive
milestones in two different ways. One is to move them later and the other
is to take them seriously and try to meet them.
The current data show that we tend to take a long time to produce
specifications. If we think that is fine, then there is nothing to fix.
Personally I believe that making and setting more aggressive milestones
will make our work both more relevant to the current market and possibly
even better technically. (And, yes, the latter is counterintuitive.)
d/
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Dave Crocker <mailto:dave(_at_)tribalwise(_dot_)com>
TribalWise, Inc. <http://www.tribalwise.com>
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