I am very worried about the discussion on the new proposed area.
Most mails are along the line that it sounds "nice" to have a new area
formed.
Forming a new area comes at a cost for the IETF, while there are also
potential benefits. I believe it is very important for the community
to consider and understand the costs versus the benefits for the
creation of a new area.
As for the benefits, I see that we would give more well deserved
attention to an important area of work within the IETF. In addition,
it should help to alleviate overload within the transport area.
However, there are also many costs associated with this proposal,
among others:
- we need two more people out of the community who are going to spend
a lot of their time on the administrative side of our organization
instead of producing real work for the IETF.
- the nomcom will need to do more work to appoint more ADs.
- IETF documents will receive more scrutiny in the IESG. While this
could be considered a good thing, there has been a significant
amount of backlash in the community that enough is enough. I for one
believe that we currently already provide enough review, and possibly
already too much.
- Management research has shown that optimal group sizes are in
general quite a bit smaller than the current IESG. In fact, I see
already significant strains within the IESG due to our group size.
For example, we have a hard time to find a time, date and location
for our retreats that work for all of our members. The definition of
"A hard time" is that we spend significant amount of time trying to
find a date and time that works for all of us. Other examples in
terms of meetings where we all have to attend is a conference call
regarding an appeal. We spend time on checking out who is actually
present during an IESG call. We have issues with conference calls
where somebody causes an echo on the conference system. The more
people attend, the more time it takes to debug the problem. We send
mail among each other, the more members we have the more mail we
will receive and the more time we will need to read and respond to
IESG internal mails. The more we specialize the function of areas,
the more inter-area coordination will be needed. We have discussions
about drafts and many other issues during the telechats, the more
people we have the more time we will spend on these discussions.
Adding two more ADs has the potential to make this quite a bit worse
as our group size is already in the territory of too large to
operate efficiently. Two more ADs will bring us yet another step
closer to the tipping point of where we will only be busy among
ourselves instead of serving the community.
I guess it comes as no surprise that I have serious issues with this
proposal.
While the idea sounds nice, the operational details will cause us more
pain than it provides benefits. An IESG that doesn't operate
efficiently is not in the benefit of the IETF. I believe that many of
the benefits of a new area can be had without adding a new area.
Alternatives could be to create a special attention area towards Real
Time Applications within the Application area with one of the two ADs
in the Applications area specializing on such applications.
Another approach could be to do serious surgery on how the IESG
operates to make it a more scalable group.
I believe it is very dangerous to add an area before addressing the
issues associated with a larger IESG as it will get ever harder to
make such changes while our group grows less efficient by piecemeal
fixes instead of looking at the larger issue of how the IESG as a
whole can become more efficient to the benefit of the IETF.
David Kessens
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