--On Monday, 24 October, 2005 09:56 +0200 Brian E Carpenter
<brc(_at_)zurich(_dot_)ibm(_dot_)com> wrote:
...
If one wanted to be highly formal and objective, but still
have the scope for such lists constrained to IETF
activities, then requiring a draft charter and a BOF
request, or the like, might be reasonable.
ADs do that for BOF requests but it feels like overkill to do
it for pre-BOF discussions.
It seems to me that (as usual) some guidance and good sense
would do us a lot more good in this sort of area than more
rules. It also seems to me that this is the common
"appropriateness of design teams" discussion in another form.
There are times when it is useful to get broad input --or at
least input that is as broad as possible-- as early as possible.
If one had one of those situations, it would make sense to have
an announcement to the community early on -- whether or not the
list was IETF-hosted and whether the announcement was "official"
on IETF-Announce or informal on the main IETF list. If we
required a formal draft BOF charter or WG request to make such
an announcement, we would defeat the advantages of an early "we
are starting to look at topic XYZ, anyone interested should join
in the discussion" announcement/request.
There are times when an early announcement is likely to only
contribute noise and excursions into the weeds. For those
circumstances, a quiet effort to create a strawman set of
proposals may be much more effective in focusing work and an
early and general announcement might cause pathology. It may
still be appropriate to have the discussions covered by IETF IPR
policy. If the best way to accomplish that is to have the IETF
host a mailing list, then we should have the IETF host the
mailing list... even if that list is restricted-membership with
archives available to the public only with some significant
delay. If we don't permit that, we drive these efforts from
"quiet" to "secret and underground". That actually frustrates
long-term openness and participation and may lead to calls for
IETF efforts to ratify what the smaller group has created,
rather than assuming complete change control after the work
emerges into a WG.
And there are probably dozens of possible scenarios that lie
between, or beyond, those two.
Let's try for good sense rather than for an extended discussion
about some rule or guideline that should (or "MUST") apply to
everything. Good ideas, like people, rarely survive Procrustean
Beds.
john
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