Re: [isdf] 1. New Report: "Understanding WSIS" (Hans Klein)

On Wednesday, December 10, 2003, at 10:32  PM, Franck Martin wrote:

> But let's face it:
> They cannot operate a mailing list
<etc/>
> So how do we move from that to ISOC driving the Internet Governance part?
> ISDF is somehow a loose collection of people that never stop to argue and do not produce much as a collective. IETF is nearly the same, except individuals came make contribution that will get peer reviewed... and they are motivated to do that...
>
> So does ISOC needs to add a staff on its payroll who will be dedicated in reviewing governance documents and issues and publish RFCg (RFC on governance)? Like ISOC is paying for the IETF RFC writing Secretariat...
>
> My quick answer is YES, and they must do it fast, real fast...
>
> Hint: They can use some of the .org money for that...
>
> Cheers

Franck, why don't we make like an open source project and do it ourselves? We talked before about a process to generate documents. I think coming out of that discussion, I think there is clearly a situation where a substantial body of work could be built up by people on this list under the title of ISDF documents. 

And I think that's a good thing. Don't we all write about internet societal / policy issues anyway? This would be a good way to build up a body of work that has more overall weight to it. Since ISOC obviously isn't going to do it for us (they can't even run a mailing list ...) why don't we just do it ourselves? Any kind of basic website infrastructure we can just set up somewhere for temporary purposes until we convince ISOC to adopt it officially.

I propose the following straw man for how to set this up, feel free to kick it.

1) Anyone can submit a draft to the Drafts archive
2) The draft author needs to get two Reviews and one SuperReview to move the document to the Documents archive

We then establish two panels, a panel of Reviewers and a panel of SuperReviewers. Reviewers can have a very wide membership. I would suggest that anyone can have Reviewer status with the simple support of any other Reviewer or SuperReviewer. SuperReviewers will have a limited membership. It might not be a fixed number but I'm thinking about a dozen people at most. Potentially SuperReviewers would have an area of expertise that they usually handle.

Reviewers are expected to do a basic vet on the document. It's well-written, communicates the point clearly, and meets some reasonable standard for accuracy.

SuperReviewers delegate most of their work to the Reviewers. They do a sanity check and make whatever kind of interventions seem appropriate. Any SuperReviewer willing to grant a super-review can allow the draft into the document archive.

We would seed the SuperReviewers list with people who have been active on ISDF and *want* the job. I nominate myself :-) Reviewers we can be permissive and allow anyone for some getting-started period :-)

The overall structure would be permissive. I can see that conflicting documents might be in the same archive :-) But that's OK ... the point is more to build up an archive of reviewed works than to try to achieve some kind of unachievable consensus.

If we get this working, we could add another layer where we actually try to achieve consensus and nominate specific documents into RFCg status :)

Do people like this idea?

simon

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