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Re: meta-issues on charter discussions

2009-08-19 15:26:48
It is essential that we can easily show differences and explain the rationale behind a particular change. Right now the public charter review process rarely does that. For contrast, when I recharter a working group I usually send a message to IESG, IAB, and few of our directorates. The message contains:

- explanation of what has happened in the real world or IETF to justify a change
- the new charter text
- a diff (I simply run rfcdiff on the old and new texts and attach a .html file, or put it on my website)

But what goes out on the public call for review is a stripped down version: just the new charter text. I agree that its very hard to parse from the end result what the rationale or the difference was. This is made even harder by some formatting and HTML issues that one would typically encounter when trying to look at the IETF web charter and another version in an e-mail. I think an improvement here would be useful. I think there's been a few times when I have posted a separate e-mail explaining the rationale and changes, as a reply to the ietf-announce mail. But I certainly have not done it for every WG. Maybe I should have.

However, speaking personally, for some reason I'm not too enthusiastic about writing charters in drafts. Perhaps this is just resistance to a change, but I have found it personally easy to deal with the charters simply as text. Writing charters as drafts would in my opinion complicate the process. I couldn't write a proposed charter version NN for a BOF in the two weeks before an IETF meeting. And often the different versions are written by different people, e.g., original proponents, then selected BOF chairs, then ADs. Some of these people would probably take it longer to set up the necessary tools and submit the draft than it would take from them to send an e-mail with text. And not all versions of charter proposals represent actually agreed charters. Typically even a simple recharter event would go through 2-3 iterations.

But I do have an alternate proposal, if its important for the IETF community to understand the differences and rationales of charter changes better. Why don't we simply change the announcement format to include the three parts that I outlined above? My understanding is that the process is largely manual from the secretariat's point of view, so all it would take is for the AD to include three pieces of information instead of one when requesting a charter review to be sent out. In most cases this information exists already, its just a matter of sending it out to the public as well as the IESG.

Jari

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