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Re: what happened to newtrk?

2006-09-05 21:51:34
On Tue, 5 Sep 2006, Eliot Lear wrote:
Numerous proposals were made within the working group.  The ISD proposal
seemed to be the one that had the most support.  However, this proposal
ran into stiff opposition within the IESG and was effectively killed. 
We can argue until the cows come home as to whether or not the ISD
proposal was ready for prime time.  However, the end result was that we
had a working group chartered to do a specific task, do the task, and
then have the work rejected.

From my perspective as an outsider, I have to say that I was
extremely disappointed that the WG spent the bulk of its time on
"the creation of a new series of short IESG-approved IETF documents
to describe and define IETF technology standards" rather than
concentrating on redefining the standards track.

What I would like to know is what we could have done to prevent this
from happening.  Was the newtrk charter not sufficiently narrow to
accomplish a task for which there was community consensus?

Having just re-read the charter, I would have to say so.  I think we
would have been better served if the WG had been given the much less
ambitious task of producing an update of RFC 2026 that describes what
we actually do.

Eventually, as I wrote in a previous note, we must circle back and
actually fix the standards process to reflect reality.  But how that is
to be done remains to me an open question.

Well, one possibility might be to charter a design team or WG to do
just that -- i.e., to take the term "Best Current Practice" at face
value and produce of a standards process BCP that actually documents
current practice.

//cmh


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