It seems to me that we hit a vicious circle in which the lack of standards
progressing beyond proposed has meant that proposed standard has been
considered sufficiently advanced for adoption leading to more people
worrying about rough edges in proposed standards and demanding more complete
documents further erasing the practical distinction between proposed and
draft, thus further reducing the incentive to progress the drafts and so on.
The result is that the criteria for proposed today are more than sufficient
for a draft standard.
As many people have pointed out, the use Informational and Experimental
means that we will still have scope for a three step process in cases where
it is relevant.
I completely disagree with Martin Rex on this one. We have tried to make a
broken system work for twenty years. The issues Russ is raising now have
been raised before. The people who argued to give the system as written one
last chance got their way last time. THEY MUST NOT GET THEIR WAY AGAIN.
We have been there and done that. Trying to make the broken system work
didn't work last time. There is no reason to expect a different outcome if
we try the same thing the same way yet another time. That is the definition
of insanity according to someone famous.
Last time the reforms were blocked without the IETF at large even knowing
who was responsible. It was a decision the IESG took in private as if it
only affected them and they were the only people who should have a say. So
much for bottom up organization.
I think that we need to be assured that this time the ground rules for
debate will be different and that either the IESG is going to accept the
need for change or at the very least reveal who objected and what their
reasons were.
On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 10:37 AM, Russ Housley
<housley(_at_)vigilsec(_dot_)com> wrote:
Dave:
This observation was based on many hallway discussions with many people
over many years. You are correct to observe that there are many factors
at play, and many of them were discussed at the mic in plenary. The
draft changes process in many different places. I've attempted to
balance many differnt things in this proposal. Only community
discussion will determine if the balance is acceptable.
There is always risk in process changes. The goal is to make changes
where the benefits outweigh the risk.
Russ
On 6/23/2010 5:25 AM, Dave CROCKER wrote:
Russ,
In reading the latest version of your proposal, I finally realized that
a motivating premise:
o Since many documents are published as Proposed Standard and never
advances to a higher maturity level, the initial publication
receives much more scrutiny that is call for by RFC 2026 [1].
is well-intentioned, sounds reasonable, but is actually without any
practical foundation. In other words, we do not know that the premise
is valid.
There are many likely reasons that the process of getting through the
IESG, for Proposed, has become such a high burden. (Perhaps you did not
mean to limit the reference to mean only IESG scrutiny, but in formal
terms, it really is the only one that matters, in terms of 'scrutiny'.)
I think that a detached and thorough exploration of those possible
reasons is likely to show that the problem pre-dates the move towards
leaving documents at Proposed and, in fact, well might have contributed
to it. By virtue of having Proposed be so difficult to attain, there is
a disincentive for going through the process again, for the same
protocol.
A tendency for all of us in this kind of topic is to make simple
assertions of cause or of likely behavioral change that sound reasonable
but have little empirical basis.
We need to be careful to avoid falling into that trap, because the
changes being discussed are strategic, and could well be impossible to
reverse completely...
d/
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