At 1:32 PM -0700 6/19/08, Eliot Lear wrote:
Isn't the IESG is meant to serve two roles? The first is to be the
arbiter of community consensus. The second is to be a judge on the
quality of the work before them, as to whether it is ready to move
forward.
The IESG is not meant to over-ride the community consensus for
specific technical choices without reason. It needs to show *why*
it is over-riding a specific technical choice in a way that references
existing consensus, technical correctness, or the health of the
Internet. Saying "I don't like the way you have done it, do it
my way" is not their job, and the existing "discuss criteria" document
tries to make that clear.
This is not about an overall judgement that a doc is not ready;
this is about over-riding the informed technical judgement of
the people who are doing the work.
The threat of the IESG saying, "jeez what a {dumb|complex|...}
approach" separates us from other standards organizations (or at least
it did). The most famous example of all of this is still the
ETHERNET-MIB WG where they were upset that Jon Postel reset a counter
size in the final copy of the MIB to match the IEEE specification, and
those folks were rip roaring upset that he did so. I don't want the
IESG to author the docs like Jon did but I do want them to stand in the
way of dumb ideas.
In this case they should be there to apply our *evolving* standards. To
hogtie those folk to me just begs for others to attempt to make use of
those knots to get their dumb standards.
Shouldn't the response to John's appeal demonstrate the balance between
their two roles?
I look forward to seeing what it demonstrates.
Ted
Eliot
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