Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu> wrote:
In principle I would be against charging, but my experience of being a
chair makes me believe that many authors have no reason to publish
their I-D which are just a burden to the I-D secretariat and thus the
entire IETF community.
that's a really amazing statement. If I were participating in a WG
whose chair had that attitude, I'd be lobbying hard with the IESG for
another chair, as I'd suspect that the incumbent chair was
inappropriately hostile to introduction of new ideas within the WG.
Sorry, what "attitude" are you talking about here ? I was speaking
about people who publish drafts but never say a word to anyone about
their draft.
Please explain how it is you can be sure they haven't communicated to
anyone about their draft.
What's the purpose ?
People are, as a rule, lazy. It is therefore pretty unlikely that they will
engage in a fairly time-consuming activity with no purpose in mind.
A better question is whether or not the purpose for which some drafts are
published is in line with the general goals of the IETF, and if it isn't should
something be done about it. For example, I suspect that in some cases drafts
are published primarily for the authors to be able say that they have done work
in the IETF.
So let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that (a) The cost of publishing
an I-D is significant, (b) Lots of drafts are published that aren't intended
to fulfill the goals of the IETF.
Given these assumptions the obvious fix is to reduce publication costs with
better automation. I find it extremely hard to believe that our publication
needs cannot be met with an almost entirely automated system, one where the
per-draft costs are extremely low. We might have to sacrifice a little to make
it work, but given that we're a bunch of engineers here and engineering is
always about tradeoffs I see no reason why we should be unwilling or unable to
apply engineering principles to our internal processes. For example, if
extraction of drafts from email cannot be automated I think we all could
survive with a web-based submission tool.
But even if we cannot get the costs down I don't think charging for being able
to post a draft solves the problem. Rather, the likely outcomes is that people
will simply stop posting drafts to a central server. They will instead post
their drafts to their own servers and send a message to one or more IETF lists
saying they have done so. So this won't work unless we accompany the charge
with a hard rule that only drafts posted to the authorized IETF server can be
discussed on IETF lists, and at that point I suspect we'd have a full scale
revolt on our hands. (To be perfectly honest I'd likely be one of the people
leading the revolt.)
If the purpose is to get new ideas
through, I don't see how publishing a draft and non advertising is
useful for the sender (it may for the reader). But more importantly, I
don't see what you see as "hostile" in the observation above.
Your saying that your experience as a working group chair is what led you to
this conclusion is what made it hostile - very hostile indeed IMO. It would
have read very differently had you instead made the comment speaking as a
general IETF participant. But given the context Keith's characterization
sounded spot on to me.
Ned
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