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RE: When to adopt a draft as a WG doc (was RE: "IETF work is done on the mailing lists")

2012-11-30 08:09:57
From: ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org 
[mailto:ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org] On Behalf Of
Melinda Shore

I'm not very clear on what problem you're trying to solve, or why it's a
problem.  I've seen some stuff around working group draft adoption that
I don't like very much but am not sure that I'd identify those as a
"problem," per se, or that they would be done better with yet another
process document.
[WEG] My original message simply notes that this is the 3rd or more time in my 
recent memory that there has been a serious question within some part of the 
IETF about when in a document's lifecycle and maturity is the "right" time to 
adopt it as a WG document, and whether it is appropriate to discuss an 
individual document in a WG at any length without adopting it. It seemed odd to 
me that there would be this much confusion on the matter, and I provided 
several examples of different philosophies that I have observed when it comes 
to handling this question. The response I got back indicated that WG adoption 
of drafts isn't really "a thing" as far as the official documentation of 
document lifecycle is concerned, which made me wonder if perhaps we do as much 
WG adoption of drafts as we do mainly out of inertia, either people doing it 
because that's how they've seen others do it in the past, or doing it because 
they assume it's part of the documented process, rather than for any!
  real reason. I'm not a big fan of doing things for no reason, so the ensuing 
discussion was intended to tease this out a bit to see whether we should have 
some clearer guidelines around WG draft adoption, better education on the 
reasoning behind it, or whether maybe we should stop doing it. Is it the 
largest problem facing the IETF? Not by a long shot. But it seemed worth a 
little discussion, at least to me.

Process we just don't happen to like is not a problem.

[WEG] process we don't happen to like because it adds no value or confuses 
people or wastes time is very much a problem. But I didn't bring this up 
because I didn't like the process, I brought it up because I was seeking a 
little clarity on the underlying reasons we use the process (at least partially 
to improve my own knowledge as a WG chair and draft author). Thus far that 
clarity has still not presented itself.

Wes George

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