HOWEVER, it does seem that you seem to believe that the _primary_
responsibility of an AD is as a project manager and a process
manager/cop.
Yes...
RFC 2026, The Internet Standards Process -- Revision 3:
14. DEFINITIONS OF TERMS
...
Area Director - The manager of an IETF Area. The Area Directors
along with the IETF Chair comprise the Internet Engineering
Steering Group (IESG).
Hmmm. Manager.
And the label is used alone. No other descriptive word is used. Nothing
about technical contribution.
RFC 2418, IETF Working Group Guidelines and Procedures:
6.7. Area Director
Area Directors are responsible for ensuring that working groups in
their area produce coherent, coordinated, architecturally consistent
and timely output as a contribution to the overall results of the
IETF.
"Coherent, coordinated and timely" are explicitly management tasks. As i
noted about Steve Bellovin's AAA reference, there is a strong component of
"architecturally consistent" that also is management, when the task is done
properly in the way he described.
If that is the case, then it may be that it may be very difficult to
find volunteers willing to do what is, quite frankly, scut work.
There was no difficulty finding volunteers when area directors had literally
NO authority, pre-Kobe.
I guess the quality of AD was lower then, as was the quality of IETF output.
In terms of sampling, clearly such people are no longer prevalent in the IETF...
So if we do that, it may make sense to make the job of being a project
manager and process maven to be that of a staff position.
Yes, it is appealing to believe that the task can be routinized to be
performed by someone with no knowledge of the technical specialties.
But it can't.
If that's not what you wanted to advocate, perhaps it would be helpful
if you were to offer some concrete examples of what would be part of
the AD's job in your ideal universe, and what would _not_ be part of
And here's where my frustration kicks in, since I have posted concrete
examples pretty constantly over the last 3 years. And, no, I'm not going to
retrieve them from the archive.
d/
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