Hi Harald,
At 08:18 15-07-2011, Harald Alvestrand wrote:
The document does not refer back to the aims of the experiment,
which I tried to make explicit in section 5 of RFC 4693, which include:
- Easy updating
- Explicit approval
- Accessible history
The sum total of analysis in this document is two sentences:
The cited IESG statement
It is clear that the IESG, IAB, and IAOC need the ability to
publish documents that do not expire and are easily updated.
Information published as web pages, including IESG Statements, are
sufficient for this purpose.
The draft's statement
Taking everything into account, it was considered that IONs added
complications to the maintenance of documents but did not give a
corresponding benefit to the IETF.
I would at least expect those three points to be explicitly
addressed by analysis, such as:
I'll quote some text from Section 5 of RFC 4693:
"The IETF is an open organization, which means (among other things)
that there are always newcomers coming in to learn how to perform
work; this places a requirement on the organization to document its
processes and procedures in an accessible manner."
There is a steep learning curve for newcomers. One of the ways for
some people to learn is by reading the RFCs. Sometimes these
documents do not reflect current practice. That is not obvious to
newcomers who are not aware of the open secrets which seems to be
common knowledge within the IETF.
There are times when an experiment fails. When there isn't any
documentation, one has to rely on those with "institutional" memory
to pass down the history.
"The IETF is also a large organization, which means that when
procedures change, there are a number of people who will like to know
of the change, to figure out what has changed, and possibly to
protest or appeal the change if they disagree with it."
It can also be important to understand why it may not be feasible to
adopt a procedure that has been tried previously.
Commenting on Section 3.2 of draft-yevstifeyev-ion-report-06, "URIs
don't change: people change them". The IETF makes an effort to
preserve old URIs so that its web pages does not expire. Sometimes a
document falls through the cracks [1].
The ION experiment is a failure if only because the IETF has yet to
come to terms with the notion of "lessons learnt".
Regards,
-sm
1. http://www.ietf.org/IESG/STATEMENTS/tsv-alt-cc.txt
http://www.ietf.org/iesg/STATEMENTS/ad-sponsoring.html
http://www.ietf.org/iesg/content/agenda-minutes-procedures.html
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