Speaking as someone who usually doesn't know what the IESG is thinking ...
;-)
I applaud the attempt to explain this situation to the community, and can
only echo that during my years as IESG scribe, this situation does arise
fairly frequently - I'd guess quarterly, just from memory. So it is nice to
see the IESG talking to the community, and trying to be proactive, instead
of waiting until the OBE specification hits Publication Requested and
everyone freaks out (as the statement says now).
("Always easier to talk about the general case than about $THIS working
group")
But I also share John's concerns about (inadvertantly?) constraining the
IESG's ability to use judgement and face the resulting feedback, when the
Right Thing to Do may not have been anticipated when the IESG made the
rules.
Most of this statement does NOT use 2119 language, so I was reading the text
that doesn't use 2119 language as an attempt to explain to the community
what the IESG is likely to do, and reduce the level of astonishment when the
situation comes up. I liked that more.
John, if the existing 2119 language went away, and the statement pointed out
(as you said) that the IESG has always had the authority to do what the
statement describes, would that help?
I'd also suggest including a sentence that points out the costs of us
producing and publishing ANYthing - I know that I've talked to a lot of IETF
people who don't usually think about these costs. That might help the
community focus when an IESG question about OBE hits the community.
("is this work worth the impact it will have on getting YOUR work through
the IESG, and the impact it will have on YOUR registration costs?")
Thanks,
Spencer
Hi.
I largely agree with Harald's comments, which I will not repeat.
I do, however, have a concern that he didn't mention (and might
not agree with). While I am generally in favor of the IESG's
telling the community about how it thinks about issues, there is
a fuzzy boundary between doing that and trying to create more
and more rules and mechanisms in the hope that those can be
substituted for careful judgment. There isn't quite enough
information in this statement for me to be sure how the IESG
intends to use it (that is not a complaint), but I fear it will
lie on the "more rules" rather than "better explanation" side of
the boundary.
It appears to me that it creates a new category and set of rules
about that category, but that the criteria for getting something
into that category are extremely subjective and dependent on
IESG judgment. That may be ok, but the IESG has always had the
authority to shut down WGs because they are not making progress
or have become irrelevant and has always been able to make
determinations about the proper classification of documents.
Put differently, I don't understand the problem that this
document is trying to solve. Classifying something as OBE
doesn't move us forward any better than simply identifying what
is actually going on. After reading the statement, I have no
more information about how to identify something as OBE than I
do about how to identify a WG as not working on anything anyone
cares about. The advice to avoid chartering WGs with very long
running times has been part of the culture for as long as I can
remember; it is not clear that recommendation in this document
will make any difference.
I don't seem much difference between the IESG (or an AD) saying
"this WG is not making any progress on any subject that anyone
cares about any more" and generating a statement that permits
identifying a subset of those cases with a specific label. If
there is no difference, then this document is useless but
harmless except insofar as it contributes to a growing pile of
rules. On the other hand, if the difference is that classifying
something in this way constrains the IESG's ability to apply
good sense and case-by-case analysis to what ought to be done
with partially-complete WG products, then it could easily be a
problem rather than a solution to one.
If the real problem is that the IESG has decided that ADs
cannot, in practice, shut WGs down when people still want to
work in them, no matter how irrelevant the work has become or
how little progress the WG is making, I suggest that new
"statements" and categories won't solve that problem because the
same folks who would object to the WG being shut down under
existing rules will object to its being defined as OBE so it can
be shut down.
john
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