John,
Proposals for upgrading/streamlining standards track in discussion
(i.e. newtrk and specifically the ISD proposal, but there's
Another derailed activity. Another activity that has nothing to do
with quality, timeliness or relevance.
Here we disagree, or I most assuredly would not be spending time on it. I
believe that, properly implemented and used, the ISD work could result in
much faster track processes for corrections and minor alterations to
standards-track materials.
Well, I can believe that it might have some of that effect. And I guess that
is why I've put time into the working group too, though the effort became
typically protracted.
What I do not believe is that the problems it remedies are anywhere near the
core of the IETF's crisis in producing timely, relevant, useful output.
with issues on which consensus is already fairly clear, we should be able
to improve quality and timeliness and, in the process, free up cycles to
invest in quality and timeliness in other areas.
This presumes that the problems being remedied are a major source of
distraction, but I do not believe they are.
I believe working groups are unproductive because they lack sufficiently
concrete, shared goals, a clear sense of the necessary, near-term
deliverables, and an urgent sense of need to produce something useful.
I believe the IESG is a problem because excellent engineers feel like doing
engineering overseeing the process by a) getting others to do the work, and b)
living with the imperfect decisions of those others.
Newtrk has nothing to do with any of these.
Explain how current document labeling practises hurt the IETF's utility
to the Internet community.
I suggest that "labeling
practices" that we don't use as documented create confusion
The IETF has been around long enough, and has affected sufficiently many
people and organizations, that I suspect we can find an existence proof for
almost any problem.
That does not make the problem worthy of our attention, since we are, after
all, limited in our resources.
Issues of misused labels or confused adopters rightly offends our
sensibilities, but there has been no indication that it is a strategic problem
to the IETF or the Internet community. Certainly I have not seen anything
like a groundswell of IETF rough consensus that it is part of our crisis.
But I suggest that
cleaning things up --as long as the marginal cost is low-- would eliminate
a source of reduced utility.
Bingo. I entirely agree. But this is a working group that has been around a
long time and engaged in extensive discussion, mostly re-visiting the same
territory many times.
That's not a low marginal cost.
Explain how the utility of the IETF to the community will be improved
by our fixing this.
We are in a situation today in which many of our specifications are not
really self-contained. Some might even suggest that few are. This has
created a procurement nightmare ...
The hope is that, by use of prose,
cross-references, unification of related specifications under a single
umbrella document, and so on, the ISDs will provide us a tool to improve
on this situation and will actually do so. And that would, indeed,
significantly improve utility.
Yes, that would be a Good Thing. But then, as the document iself notes, it's
in the ballpark of what the STD was supposed to do. And, yes, the ISD
document views itself as tweaking things, rather than re-inventing. But, oh,
I see a new document series is called for. That's not tweaking.
In other words, yes I agree that you are talking about a change that could be
a useful improvement. I don't think it is at the core of our crisis, but I
suspect the benefit of having it succeed would be quite large.
However, as you noted, there are significant critical dependencies. And again
my concern that it is a long way from a low marginal cost, with no effect on
producing new, timely, useful specifications. And that, I'm afraid, is what
determines the real future of the IETF.
d/
---
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
+1.408.246.8253
dcrocker a t ...
WE'VE MOVED to: www.bbiw.net
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