I've only heard secondhand about the activities in the sub-ip area and
so I can't offer direct feedback. However, in
<http://www.ietf.org//mail-archive/ietf/Current/msg18130.html>, John
Klensin makes the following point:
(4) There is a class of WG for which the "bounded outcome" model
will, fairly clearly, fail. And, unfortunately, such WGs seem to
be on the increase. It has become common to have a situation in
which a group of people with narrowly-focused interests come
together and insist, quite loudly and persistently, that they want
to do a particular piece of work within the IETF. Such groups are
often approved by the IESG: whether to give them a chance, or
because turning them down is too painful, or because the work might
actually be useful. But, unless we can devise rules that prevent
such groups from being chartered, or that kill them immediately if
they cannot involve a broad spectrum of the IETF community in their
work (and involve them actively), then presuming that their output
represents community approval, is extremely dangerous to the goal
of producing only IETF protocols that are competent on the public
Internet. My observations of such groups is that it is often
difficult or impossible to get them to focus on even the
applicability (or security or scaling) boundaries of their work; it
is difficult to hold the time delays that occur when the IESG
identifies and tries to remedy those problems in order to produce a
competent, or competently-bounded and documented, protocol as an
IESG failure because of excessive processing time.
I would like the IESG to consider if the work in the sub-ip area could
be considered to meet the description above and, if so, whether it is
endemic to the area. (I can easily imagine this is so, although, as I
say above, I have no facts to back this up.) If sub-ip represents
technologies that don't, and will never, get involvement from a "broad
spectrum of the IETF community," we shouldn't institutionalize it. In
this case, I would be in favor of letting the area expire when the
working groups complete their current charters (option 3).
--aaron