I have a different idea than trying to cram more meeting time into a busy week.
Is it possible that there are too many IETF working groups, or that IETF
working groups are taking on too much work?
I keep going to working group meetings that have overflowing agendas of mostly
presentations, with little time for discussion.
I also keep going to working group meetings where much of the time is devoted
to someone doing a presentation of a new idea (with associated draft), after
which the chair asks for a show of hands indicating whether the group should
take on the draft as a work item.
I don't want to discourage people from bringing new work to working groups, but
it seems to me that (a) working groups should devote plenty of time to
discussing drafts that are already work items, and (b) making progress on old
work should generally take precedence over considering new work.
It also seems to me that working groups, when considering whether to take on
new work, should consider not only whether the work is within their charters
and whether there are enough hands to take on new work, but also whether the
new work will strain the group in any of several ways. e.g. Will the adoption
of new work make it more difficult for the working group to devote adequate
time to reviewing and commenting on work already in progress? Will adoption
of the new work cause the working group's schedule to slip? etc.
I understand very well that when technical people get immersed in a problem
space, they see more and more problems that need to be solved. But the trick
that IETF needs to learn, I suspect, is making sure that the core problems are
well solved, and that (when feasible) the solutions are sufficiently general
that they can apply to a wide variation in problem spaces. And sometimes,
the trick is to walk away after the core problems are solved and avoid the
temptation to try to nail down everything.
Another impression that I have is that IETF has a management structure that
evolved when IETF was trying to accommodate 3,000+ participants at a meeting,
and now we have around 1200. And yet the rate of RFC production seems to have
increased drastically, though perhaps that's just my imagination. Are we
putting out more documents of lower quality or relevance?
Keith
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