Well, is that a meta-judgment call?
I took the view that the full process expressed in draft-farrell-ft could not be
done by the IESG at their discretion. That is, that some of the steps proposed
constituted a significant variation from documented processes or
well-established behavior. Thus, it was my opinion that if such changes were to
be made they would either need to be documented direct in a BCP or run as a 3933
experiment. It was also my opinion that consensus for a BCP would be improbable
(looks like discussion on this list has upheld that view), and so *if* this was
to go ahead it would need to be as a 3933 experiment.
Turns out, however, that the community is not willing to try this experiment as
currently documented. That's OK.
I do not take quite the same negative view as Stephen, but I do agree with
Spencer that getting consensus for a process change always looks like a
formidable task. Small changes never address enough of the problem or the right
piece of the problem. Large changes are too much in one go. :-) So, it seems to
be increasingly hard to make changes to our process.
While IESG statements remain an option, I would not like to see them regularly
used for things that are definitively a change to consensus-based process and
especially for things that change the way the community is supposed to behave.
On the other hand, IESG statements are fine for declaring how the IESG will
behave, for advising on action within existing parameters, and for emergency
action.
So, my conclusion: it would be good to have more process experiments if people
feel the process needs to change. However, it would appear that such experiments
need:
- Thorough debate on an appropriate mailing list first
Do we need a "process experiments" mailing list?
- Very clear expression of the purpose of the experiment
and how it will be evaluated
- Very tight scoping to a portion of the IETF or of the IETF's
work so that the risk of the experiment simply changing
the IETF's process by default is removed
Cheers,
Adrian
-----Original Message-----
From: Spencer Dawkins [mailto:spencer(_at_)wonderhamster(_dot_)org]
Sent: 29 January 2013 21:35
To: John C Klensin
Cc: Thomas Narten; adrian(_at_)olddog(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk;
ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: FW: Last Call: <draft-farrell-ft-03.txt> (A Fast-Track way to RFC
with
Running Code) to Experimental RFC
Just as a follow-up here ...
I was John's co-author on RFC 3933 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3933).
When we were working on the draft, the problem I thought we were
solving, was that the IESG needs to update the IETF's BCP processes from
time to time, but (1) it was like 32 simultaneous root canals to
actually get community consensus to modify the IETF's process BCPs
including untried changes that might be improvements, so (2) the IESG
was using informal IESG statements developed with much less community
involvement than was expected for process BCP changes, in order to get
anything done at all.
I (and, I think, John as well) saw RFC 3933 process experiments as a
middle path between lightweight IESG decisions and full process BCP
revisions. That's what I thought Section 2 of RFC 3933 was trying to say.
I had assumed that if the IESG clearly had discretion to do something
under the current process BCPs, and thought it was the right thing to
do, they would just do it, rather than set up a process experiment.
For what that's worth.
Spencer
On 1/24/2013 12:34 PM, John C Klensin wrote:
--On Tuesday, January 22, 2013 16:31 -0500 Thomas Narten
<narten(_at_)us(_dot_)ibm(_dot_)com> wrote:
This document seems to have a bit of missing the forest for the
trees. In the overall scheme of things, I don't believe the
draft will materially help, and is at best a distraction from
dealing with meaningful problems.
The crux of the issue is that any attempt at "fast tracking" is
fundamentally about short-circuiting some aspect of our review
processes. We should only do that very carefully. In almost
all cases, individual judgement is needed as to when it is
appropriate to do that. ADs/WG chairs already have some
flexibility here. e.g., a WG can skip WG LC if they think its
...
Hi.
First of all, I am completely in agreement with Thomas and his
analysis. Anything that can reasonably and appropriately be
done by this sort of effort can be done by discretion without
adoption of a formal procedure and adoption of a formal
procedure creates additional and unnecessary risks.
As co-author of the process experiment model, I also object to
its use when it is not demonstrably necessary, for example to
give extra status and force IETF-wide use where the actions
suggested can be carried out as a matter of normal discretion
(see Section 5 of the document).