At 15:49 06-02-2013, The IESG wrote:
The IESG has received a request from an individual submitter to consider
the following document:
- 'Experiences from Cross-Area Work at the IETF'
<draft-arkko-iesg-crossarea-02.txt> as Informational RFC
The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits
final comments on this action. Please send substantive comments to the
ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org mailing lists by 2013-03-06. Exceptionally, comments
may be
I read draft-arkko-iesg-crossarea-03 as I am trying to learn about
the IETF. In Section 2:
"This work has been going on in the TRILL WG on the Internet Area
and in parallel in the ISIS WG on the Routing Area."
There is an assumption that I know what "WG" means.
Editorial: I suggest within the area instead of on the area.
In Section 3:
"Cross-area work is needed, of course, in any situation where a
particular technical problem does not cleanly map to one
organization."
Shouldn't that map to a working group?
In Section 4:
"But it is also possible that concerns raised in one forum are
not understood in another, and this can lead to an effort going
forward after finding the "lowest bar" forum to take it up."
Brian Carpenter commented about Area Shopping in his Gen-ART
review. Scrolling back to Section 3, "from an IETF participant's
point of view, it is important that there is a working group where
the technical topic that he or she is interested in can be
discussed. The problem is how to identify that working group. I
went to http://datatracker.ietf.org/list/wg/ to find the working
group where I can discuss about my solution to an IPv6 problem. I
found "IPv6 Maintenance". I am not sure what that group does. As
the problem affects IPv6 operations I picked the "IPv6 Operations"
working group. I post a message to the mailing list. There isn't
any reply. My solution does some DNS stuff. I try the "Domain Name
System Operations" working group. I keep trying various mailing
lists until I find the "right" venue.
The actual problem is finding out what's the main topic of the draft
within an IETF context and identifying the proper working
group. There should also be someone to identify related topics which
will be useful as input for the draft to progress. The IESG part of
the "process" is more about identifying which working groups should
be chartered and in which area they should fall. The Area Shopping
heading looks at the problem from an IESG perspective. The "lowest
bar" is the IETF participant's perspective.
"A more common issue is that the different organizations typically
have different motivations."
The Abstract mentions "challenges for the organization of the
IETF". Although I think I understand what "Problem Ownership" is
about, I suspect that the reader might be confused about what the two
paragraphs discuss about.
"For the regular participant it is difficult to find out where there
are important documents that would deserve more review."
It's not a matter of important documents. I would say that it is
about the regular participant being able to find that document which
he/she believes is important or the subject of discussion where
his/her input would be helpful.
Recommendation 8 is about interaction between working groups. It
would be good if WG Chairs could reach out to other working groups
when a topic relates to what's in their charter. Recommendation 9
looks at conflicts from an area point of view. The current
scheduling model is based on groups the participants would like to
attend instead of conflicts which may prevent the topics being
discussed from the cross-area participants. Recommendation 10 comes
out as having 10 in the list. :-)
It took me some time to understand that the draft was about how work
is organized in the IETF. I didn't really understand what area means
except that Routing Area must have something to do with router and
Security Area must have something to do with security. I decided to
read the Informational reference and I learned that it is a
management division within the IETF.
I suggest having some text in Section 1 to introduce the areas. The
Abstract should be aligned with the Introduction Section. Section 2
provides examples of cross-area work. There aren't any examples to
illustrate the challenges except for the AD scheduling conflict.
Regards,
-sm