--On Wednesday, August 31, 2011 11:47 -0400 Keith Moore
<moore(_at_)network-heretics(_dot_)com> wrote:
...
IMO, there are two possibilities here. At this point, sadly,
both involve a chicken-and-egg problem. Such is life.
(1) We proceed as if Proposed Standards are what 2026 (and the
earlier culture) claims they are and work on ways to reinforce
that notion in the community. [...]
(2) We accept, and effectively encourage, deployment of
proposed standards in products, either because it is a lost
cause or because we think it is a good idea. [...]
Agree with your description of the two possibilities, but I
think the decision of possibility 2 has long since been forced
on us by market expectation and habit.
We could fix it, perhaps, by drastically changing how we label
our products (dropping the whole notion of "Proposed
Standard", refusing to publish your category 2 documents as
RFCs, etc.). But we can't significantly change market
perception of what "RFC" and "Proposed Standard" mean.
Whether we agree on how best to manage a perception change and
what it takes, I agree that there is no single magic bullet,
much less a painless one. I would turn your comment around
slightly and say that a change in names is likely to have little
or no effect on perceptions unless we actually change what we
do. As I said in and earlier note, there is something of a
chicken-and-egg problem here.
while probably Mostly Harmless, won't do a bit of good in the
overall scheme of things)
For reasons I've explained in previous notes, I don't think
procedural changes, especially from "not followed and doesn't
work but ancient" or "contemporary and [still] doesn't work or
reflect reality, are harmless ("mostly" or otherwise).
Remember that, while ignoring procedures and category
definitions that we don't follow is not desirable, "fixing"
them to reflect a model that doesn't (and won't) exist either
is a public demonstration that we are disconnected from
reality. I'd much rather leave that distinction to some
other SDOs than join them. YMMD.
And my assertion is that the model inherent in your
possibility #1 above doesn't exist and won't exist absent from
drastic change. Insisting on high quality for proposed
standards is recognizing current market reality.
If you are right, then fussing around with how many maturity
levels we have, what criteria we claim we are using, and even
how we name things, are dangerous as well as a waste of time and
resources. That is where we are maybe in violent agreement --
we either ought to be identifying real problems and fixing them
or just staying with what we have until we have the knowledge
and will needed to make real changes. In that regard, I applaud
one aspect of Jari's note, which is that it affects and IETF
administrative procedure and not a fundamental (and unnecessary)
procedural change.
By contrast, suppose draft-housley-two-maturity-levels were just
shelved for a while and replaced by an announcement by an AD or
two (ideally from areas that have really low advancement rates
even as compared to the already-low IETF average) that they
intended to
(i) accept a public assertion of interoperability as an
implementation report, issue an IETF LC for DS to see if
anyone with real experience with the protocol objects
loudly, and then move to advance the document, and
(ii) that they would construe the passage of the
relevant number of month and public claims of deployment
as sufficient incentive to issue an IETF LC for
advancement to IS.
If the rest of the IESG were willing to go along with that, we'd
have a real experiment without permanent changes to the official
procedures. People who saw a problem advancing a particular
protocol or document could object and it would presumably work
only for PS documents that were of high quality. If it worked
out, we would have a basis for coming back and evaluating
whether there really was enough of a difference between DS and
IS to be worth the trouble and whether the practical differences
between that sort of implementation report and today's
interpretation of what is required was. And then we could take
...two-maturity-levels back up with some confidence about both
utility and potential harm.
And, if you are right and this is all hopeless without really
major changes, then that experiment might give us the
information needed to finally come to grips with that and either
make the major change or accept the status quo and stop spending
energy trying to turn the knobs a degree or two.
And I'm not one of those people who believes that market
perceptions are inherently unchangeable. But expecting the
market to change how it interprets our documents without us
bothering to significantly change how we present them to the
public - THAT would indeed be a serious disconnect from
reality.
I actually agree.
john
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