Start giving IESG real rough consensus (rather than consensus by
exclusion and/or exhaustion) and real running code (or even
better, convincing analysis that the protocol will work well in the
wild), and they won't feel the need to rule by edict. IESG appears to
rule by edict because WGs demand that IESG provide them with very
concrete feedback. Simply saying "you failed to provide security" or
"you failed to address the concerns of this other group that you'll
harm their interoperability" doesn't work - either the WG will balk or
they'll sit on the document for months not being willing to fix the
problems.
All true. This is unfortunate.
So ADs try to come up with good technical solutions in order
to get closure.
But _this_ is the problem. The AD's job should be to review and manage,
not to personally try to find or design the missing pieces. This task
could and should be offloaded to a separate pool of volunteers.
No, it's a symptom. In the current environment, often the best thing
an AD can do is to come up with the solution. Of course the AD can
ask volunteers to help if he/she can find people that can bring closure
to the effort in a short time (and this does sometimes happen when
the AD determines that a particular kind of expertise is needed).
But the AD is already in the loop and knows what the constraints
are; the volunteers typically will not - unless you somehow find a way
to cultivate a new group of IETF participants with broad expertise.
We shouldn't blame the ADs for doing what (usually) works best in their
situation; instead we should find ways for WGs to produce better
documents so the ADs don't have to do that.
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