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Re: Showing support during IETF LC...

2013-02-25 15:54:46
Agree with what John, Brian, and others have said. FWIW, at times - 
particularly
with documents having some controversy - the ADs are left wondering what the
silent majority is thinking. So in some cases the private messages to the AD 
in
question or to the IESG are helpful. And while "+1" is usually bad form, 
indicating
that you've done a thorough review and found no issues is appreciated.

To go into a little detail on this point, let me talk about a
relatively recent document that came to the IESG as an AD-sponsored
item.  The document had, in its life of a few years, been offered to
at least two (i'm told three) working groups.  None of them objected
to it, but none of them wanted it, and, in the end, the author and the
sponsoring AD decided to go the AD-sponsored individual submission
route.

When I reviewed the document and its history, I found that, while it
had a bunch of comments about this or that working group not wanting
it, there was evidence of exactly two people, apart from the author
and AD, who had given it any *substantive* review and comment.  The
author discussed those comments and revised the document to address
them, so that was all fine.

I raised this as a question:
This is a document being approved in the IETF Stream, with boilerplate
that says it has IETF consensus:

   This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force
   (IETF).  It represents the consensus of the IETF community.  It has
   received public review and has been approved for publication by the
   Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG).

Does that document represent the consensus of the IETF community,
given that there was only evidence of substantive review from two
people outside the publication path?[1]

Now, perhaps... just perhaps... there were dozens of others who
reviewed it, thought it was perfectly fine and had no issues, and felt
they didn't need to say anything to that effect.  Perhaps all those
folks who said that they didn't think it should be adopted by the
working groups it was being offered to had given it very thorough
review, indeed, and found it to be an excellent document... just not
something they needed in their working groups.

That would have made a huge difference in my opinion of the level of
IETF consensus (and would have saved some cuts and bruises on the IESG
telechat).

Now, never mind any details of this particular document: the point is
that it's often useful to go on record somewhere, with someone, saying
that you've done a review, you have no issues (or agree with Ferd's
issue list, or whatever), and you're part of the consensus on the
document.  Whether those messages should be posted to the IETF list,
to the sponsoring AD, or elsewhere is a question I won't comment on.

Barry

[1] Arguably one, because one of the two was the document shepherd.
But in this case, the shepherd had reviewed it earlier, and could have
been asked to shepherd it because of that fact.  So I counted it as
two.