I guess that a better question is:
"What are the expectations if a draft becomes an WG document?"
The opinions ranges from:
a) It is something that some members of the WG consider inside the scope
of the charter.
....
z) This is a contract that the IESG will bless this document!
Not all working groups are the same, some work on brand new stuff and it
makes sense to have competing ideas progress and then the WG makes a
choice. In other cases the WG is just fixing something in an important
deployed protocol thus stricter criteria makes sense.
For a WG I have chaired we have two adoption paths:
a) publish draft as draft-<editor>-<wg>---, discuss on WG mailing list
once document is on track and people can make intelligent choice ask
for adoption.
b) Chairs based on discussion on lists or events, will
"commission" a WG document to address a particular issue. This will be
published as draft-ietf-<wg>- in version 00. Most of the time this is
reserved for updated version of published RFC's.
Olafur
On 28/11/2012 10:36, George, Wes wrote:
From: ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
[mailto:ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org] On
Behalf Of John Leslie
I'm increasingly seeing a "paradigm" where the review happens
_before_ adoption as a WG draft. After adoption, there's a great
lull until the deadline for the next IETF week. There tend to be a
few, seemingly minor, edits for a version to be discussed. The
meeting time is taken up listing changes, most of which get no
discussion. Lather, rinse, repeat...
[WEG] I've seen several discussions recently across WG lists, WG
chairs list, etc about this specific topic, and it's leading me to
believe that we do not have adequate guidance for either WG chairs or
participants on when it is generally appropriate to adopt a draft as
a WG document. I see 3 basic variants just among the WGs that I'm
actively involved in: 1) adopt early because the draft is talking
about a subject the WG wants to work on (may or may not be an
official charter milestone), and then refine a relatively rough draft
through several I-D-ietf-[wg]-* revisions before WGLC 2) adopt after
several revisions of I-D-[person]-[wg]-* because there has been
enough discussion to make the chairs believe that the WG has interest
or the draft has evolved into something the WG sees as useful/in
charter; Then there are only minor tweaks in the draft up until WGLC
(the above model) 3) don't adopt the draft until some defined
criteria are met (e.g. interoperable implementations), meaning that
much of the real work gets done in the individual version
It seems to me that these variants are dependent on the people in the
WG, the workload of the group, the chairs, past precedent, AD
preferences, etc. It makes it difficult on both draft editors and
those seeking to follow the discussion for there to be such a
disparity from WG to WG on when to adopt drafts. I'm not convinced
that there is a one-size-fits-all solution here, but it might be nice
to coalesce a little from where we are today. So I wonder if perhaps
we need clearer guidance on what the process is actually supposed to
look like and why. If someone can point to a document that gives
guidance here, then perhaps we all need to be more conscientious
about ensuring that the WGs we participate in are following the
available guidance on the matter.
Wes George
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