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Re: The IETF Mission

2004-01-19 16:49:18

On 1/19/2004 3:47 PM, Vernon Schryver wrote:

Not all important ideas enter the working group process and emerge 
as standards, and the fact that some working group chooses not to 
"capture" an document does not make it necessarily unworthy of 
preservation.  ...

Another approach here is to allow for the creation of ad-hoc WGs.
That would provide a cleaner path for tangential documents that don't
fit ...

Let's see if I've got all of this straight:

No (although I'm not really sure you tried). "Ad-hoc" isn't supposed to
mean 'anything goes', but about providing an alternative channel to BOFs.

I'm sure there was a time where discouraging potentially frivolous efforts
by imposing a high cost of entry was considered a positive benefit of the
design. It still might be. If the objective is to broaden the scope and
quantity of documents to be published, however, lowering that bar would be
useful. Speaking for myself and others, getting volunteer part-timers from
multiple different continents to the same meeting is a pain, and the
payoff is so far into the future and marginal that it usually isn't worth
the cost involved.

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/



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