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Re: WG management

2005-06-16 11:02:02

 I am not personally a fan of term limits -- they have significant
 downsides.

What are those downsides, for the situation under discussion?


 And, yes, I know that the result of this could be insulting to some
 under-performaing chairs, including me.

Which means that it would be nice to find a way to deal with the current
concerns that does not run into the considerable and mutual pain of a
rejection process.


 One possible tool to consider is a "slip chart" which plots the
 estimated date of delivery against the date the estimate is made.

We need to be careful that we do not focus on creation of clever tools
while ignoring more strategic -- and frankly pretty simple -- issues:

1.  An IETF effort that succeeds does so because of substantial
community need and activity.  If either are lacking, the effort will
fail.

2.  For something on the scale of the Internet, "substantial community"
must almost always translate into a big number. If an IETF effort cannot
muster such levels of involvement, it needs to question whether the work
really is appropriate for the global Internet.

3.  The concept of rough consensus means that no one person is
essential. Neither to contribute nor to veto.  This should translate
into the ability to replace chairs easily.

4.  If an effort cannot come up with alternative chairs reasonably
easily, again we need to question the appropriateness of the effort.

5.  The question of whether a working group is making timely and
productive progress ought to be pretty easy to assess.  Milestones are
relevant, but careful analysis is probably not nearly as important as
seeing whether it just plain "feels" productive.

Consequently, automatically (not conditionally) replacing chairs every
two years is actually a pretty reasonable idea.

Similarly a zero-based working group renewal process every two years
makes quite a lot of sense.  In other words, the assumption is that it
won't get renewed.  The working group needs to make a case that its
efforts have been productive enough to warrant continuation.

To date, we treat most of the IETF process as uinsg free resources.
Hence we do no real scheduling of valuable resources, except by fifo and
congestion behaviors.  Is that really any way to run a major standards
group?

  d/
  ---
  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  +1.408.246.8253
  dcrocker  a t ...
  WE'VE MOVED to:  www.bbiw.net



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