At 1:42 PM -0800 3/8/08, Russ Housley wrote:
I think you completely misunderstand my point. A reviewer can make a
comment, and the authors or WG can say that they disagree. This is
important for an AD to see. The AD now needs to figure out whether
the reviewer is in the rough part of the rough consensus or whether
the reviewer is representative of a larger part of the community. If
the review is ignored, then the AD get no indication that further
investigation is needed.
<snip>
True. As you have heard from Tim and me, these reviews are very
helpful to the ADs, and I am saying that the discussion that follows
such a review is helpful in judging consensus.
Creating an environment where all these additional reviews and
reviewers essentially block document progress is not the right direction.
I agree, and requiring a response to the review is substantially
different than blocking a document. The alternative is silence, and
silence cannot aid in judging consensus.
I think you and Tim (and potentially other ADs in areas that have review
teams) are missing an opportunity here. Over time, these review teams
have been grown to the point where they do their reviews at Last Call
or before. That's a very good thing. One of the reasons it *could* be a good
thing
is to foster a culture of general cross area review. If the Last Call reviews
by
SAAG, Transport, Applications, and so on were seen as positive activities of the
areas, they could help encourage even earlier cross area review, either by
those teams or the areas as a whole. Since that is one of the main selling
points of the IETF, that would be, let us say, nice.
To make that happen, though, you'd have to see them as your areas feeding
Last Call comments into the general Last Call commentary stream. Those
are resolved by the shepherds and the area advisor, not by the area directors
for the areas. The way you're doing it now treats these reviews differently,
as advice to the area director of a relevant area, to be resolved differently.
In other words, it continues to make the individual IESG folks the focus of the
activity. That limits the benefits this review can provide, pretty much, to
the benefit the IESG can absorb. If the IESG isn't doing the early review,
the review teams don't either.
To put this another way, having vibrant, active review teams for an area
could be an area of leadership. Right now, it looks like they are being used
soley as time-management aids for the ADs instead. That's a real opportunity
missed.
Ted
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