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Re: EARLY submission deadline - Fact or Fiction?

2005-11-29 11:13:14
Eric,

        One of your comments seems to apply to the effectiveness
of having an early submission deadline.  What is the point of
monkeying around with early submission deadlines when they are
not very effective anyway?

1. They add administrative hassle to working groups.

2. They lead to having the authoritative version of documents be outside the Internet-Drafts mechanism, at least for awhile.


          Sometimes a WG
chair schedules time to talk about an ID that doesn't exist at
the time of the schedule announcement and - sometimes - still has not been submitted by the time of the meeting. ...

        So, one question is whether or not it is appropriate to
allow this practice to continue.

The broad question is how much freedom a working group should have to formulate its own procedures. In the not-so-distant past, the IETF was quite friendly to wildly different working group choices. More recently our respond to cases (or, yes, patterns) of misbehavior has been to make a rule that restricts everyone with respect to procedural details.

My own view is that we need to facilitate working group progress while ensuring working group legitimacy (fairness, timeliness and relevance). I believe that progress is facilitated by letting a working group do as much self-organizing as it can, while keeping the working under pressure to be productive. We need to do this by watching for a working group going astray, rather than by imposing micro-managing, rigid rules.

I believe this view is compatible with the core of yours:

          IMHO,
I think the common - usage-based - definition is that WG chairs
get to arbitrate the meaning of these terms as it applies to ID
submissions for their own WG, especially when submissions are
late.  ...


I suspect we differ on:

        On the other hand, if someone wants to reduce the WG
chair's role in arbitrating the legitimacy of an ID submission,
then it is up to them to make sure that their submission is in
compliance with formal submission deadlines, format, etc. - so
that no "exception" is required.

If I understand correctly, you want to retain a deadline, but give the wg chair authority to override it. This certainly is reasonable, but I think it is not practical because it adds administrative overhead (and probably delay) in the Internet-Drafts processing mechanism.

A simpler rule is that the working group gets to decide its deadlines and what will be discussed at the meeting. (All of this is predicated on moving towards fully automated I-D issuance.)


d/
--

Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
<http://bbiw.net>

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