On Jun 24, 2011, at 5:40 AM, Stephen Farrell wrote:
Basically, I approached this the way Peter did. One further
point below though.
On 24/06/11 02:15, Paul Hoffman wrote:
Said a different way, what needs to happen in IETF Last Call to overcome "we
already discussed this in the WG" (which was the majority of the positive
comments in this case)? Does a non-WG member need to do more, and if so
what?
In addition to the other factors already mentioned, I didn't
see what I thought were significant new facts or issues being
raised at the IETF LC. I think that such things are perhaps
more likely to cause the IETF rough consensus to differ from
that in the WG. In this case, it looked to me like people
were bringing concerns already expressed in the WG to the
attention of the wider community, which is a reasonable thing
to do in cases like this where the WG consensus was already
fairly rough.
It could well be that I know so little about 6to4 that I was
wrong in that conclusion of course, but then there's so much
about which I know so little that I've gotten used to living
with that risk;-)
It's problematic, and I believe inappropriate, to consider WG consensus as
contributing to community consensus. The two questions need to be considered
separately, for two reasons:
1. Working groups often have strong biases and aren't representative of the
whole community. Put another way, a working group often represents only one
side of a tussle, and working groups are often deliberately chartered in such a
way as to minimize the potential for conflict within the group. So when
evaluating standards actions for the whole community, the consensus within a
working group means little. In this particular case, v6ops heavily represents
the interests of operators (who are naturally interested in having IPv6 run
smoothly in the long term) and works against the interests of applications
developers (who are naturally interested in having transition mechanisms that
allow them to ship code that uses IPv6 and an IPv6 programming model regardless
of whether the underlying network supports it).
2. Working groups have spent a lot of time working on a document and will have
several members actively participating. By contrast, most of the wider
community will not have these issues "on their radar" until they come up for
IETF-wide Last Call. Also, busy people need to find time to review a document
before making comments, and this may require multiple readings. So it's hardly
surprising if the number of IETF-wide Last Call comments is smaller than the
number of WG Last Call comments. Consensus needs to be evaluated separately
in the WG and the IETF because the populations and sample sizes are different.
Keith
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf