Re: Intermediate wg summaries

Hi, Dave,

> Currently, wgs produce 4 things:  charter, email list archive, meeting 
> notes/summary, and output documents (specifications or whatever).  None of 
> these permits intelligent assessment of working group progress, by someone 
> who is not significantly involved in a wg's on-going effort, without 
> making a massive effort to review the archive and notes record.  At best, 
> the meeting summary is good for incremental issues, not summarizing 
> integrated design (or syntax, or operations, or...) decisions.
> Given that working groups operate over many months or years, it seems like 
> we need something that is a work-to-date design/decision summary.
When I was a WG chair, chairs were required to produce a SHORT summary of 
what the HECK was going on their working groups, each IETF week, due by 
Friday morning, for our ADs.
This wasn't a perfect plan (especially if your working group met on Friday 
morning after the summaries were due :-), but it was standard practice and 
apparently had been for several years before I became a chair.
The sitting IESG noticed in San Diego that this practice has been abandoned, 
without any explicit decision to do so.
(200 WG chairs just forgot to send summaries, and the ADs forgot to notice 
that they hadn't received them :-)
Perhaps we already know how to solve part of this problem, we just don't do 
what we know we should do? :-)
I am not the genius of prehistoric IETF meeting proceedings, but don't 
believe that these summaries were widely distributed. But that's another 
question - keep in mind that some of my experience pre-dated the ID tracker, 
so there were a LOT of other things that stopped at the IESG then, which we 
have made more transparent in the intervening years. So it's very possible 
that a 1-2 page summary, produced three times per year, might not be an 
excessive burden on the people who have to produce it, and might benefit the 
people who should be reading it.
> If a working group's effort is solid and defensible, along the way, then 
> it ought to be reasonable to request that it produce a summary of its 
> work-to-date in a fashion that allows useful, critical review, without 
> having to dive into the considerable detail of a specification or the wg 
> record.
> There is likely to be an added benefit for this, beyond giving ADs 
> practical input for early- and middle-stage assessment:  The rest of the 
> community gets it, too.  And by "the rest of the community", I mean the 
> entire Internet community, not just IETF participants.
Agree with these points as well.

Spencer 


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