Trouble is, in our current process, there's rarely any formal
request for feedback, and little external visibility of a WG's
output, until Last Call.
That's what charters are for, aren't they?
in practice, they rarely serve that purpose. we're not in the habit of
structuring our groups this way.
So when I'm saying that working groups need multiple stages of
formal, external review, what I'm really saying is that we need a
structure for working groups in which we can have confidence that
sufficient feedback will be obtained early enough to put good ideas
on the right track and to see that truly bad ideas get weeded out
in due time, most of the time.
Hm, I think trying to kill bad ideas is largely a waste of time.
perhaps, but that doesn't mean we need to provide them with incubators, and
that's what many groups end up doing.
Often, the fatal flaws will show up as the idea is
developed, so a lot of them go away without doing anything anyway.
there is one important class of bad ideas that doesn't go away in IETF -- the
class of bad ideas that is obviously bad from a wider perspective but which
looks good to a set of people who are focused on a narrow problem. and in IETF
what we often do with those ideas is to protect them and encourage development
of them in isolation by giving them a working group. we sometimes even write
those groups' charters in such a way as to discourage clue donation or
discussion of other ways of solving the problem.
Keith
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