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Defining the terminology of what happens inside a WG - accepting the use of the term "Vetting"

2007-12-22 07:25:36
Folks - I want to formally put the term "VETTING" into the IETF's Dictionary to describe what it is we do to a technology inside a Working Group. What follows is my argument for that:

The IETF's WG Flow is an interesting process and needs to be characterized from the outside to allow proper references to it inside of the IP-R Flow.

What is it that happens in a WG?
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Because in the IETF... Technology is vetted.

Its my assertion here that the "interpersonal review of the technologies under standardization" is "vetting". That term applies to a number of things where "something is reviewed by a group of people". See any number of the definitions available from dictionaries across the web if needed. For instance Wikipedia defines Vetting for Software's as follows.

"Vetting is also a reference to software development. The process of vetting code refers to ensuring a build of software meets a set of very high level requirements before the build is passed to the quality assurance environment for further testing". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vetting

How this applies to the IETF is pretty simple... the Vetting in a IETF WF is the discussion of the design features with the member's of the list through NoteWell processes both written and verbal at IETF meetings. The vetting-action itself includes any public review of a submission so it is particular to NoteWell and Revision-Filing's of RFC's or version 2 or later IETF Drafts as well.

That "control of the quality and design of the software" continues with that in order to meet the IETF's Standards Process two independent and interoperable instances of said "Protocol Stacks" have to be formally implemented and then tested for that interoperability.

If that "proper review and design analysis" isn't vetting then I don't know what is.

Adoption of the term Vetting
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To that end I propose the formal adoption of the term "Vetting" to formally describe much of the process that happens within a Working Group so that the IETF's work-flow processes can be described more in line with what other standards processes which use a consensus process do. The term Vetting is actually pretty important to the IPR Descriptions as well since the output of the Vetting Process is the Intellectual Properties that the IETF is producing itself.


IETF(_at_)IETF(_dot_)ORG is the right place to bring this up
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Since the IPR-WG has specifically said it will not consider the use of the term to describe what IP transfer processes implement, this is the appropriate place to bring this request up.

Todd Glassey




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