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Re: call for ideas: tail-heavy IETF process

2013-05-02 13:15:24
Hi Jari, Hi Pete,

three issues come to my mind:

a) From several past discussions it is clear that we are not really able (maybe not willing) to change our processes. Even the smallest change faces a lot of resistance. Due to the resistance our response is to back-off and we solve a different problem instead.

Recent example: Look at the discussion from late last year that was triggered by the interactions regarding the WhatWG and Ian Hickson. This was a discussion about our long document production process. Some time later the discussions shifted to the discussion of an experiment to shorten the last call when running code is available, which then did not go anywhere and was only recently resurrected.

b) There is no interest to research where delay really happen. Your statistics just tell that there is delay but not why (of course). From my own experience I noticed that there are many reasons for delay and I am not sure I can blame it to the IESG reviews for most of the delay. It is only during the IESG review phase when the problems surface that could have been tackled much earlier.

Without looking at a number of cases we might focus on the wrong issues. Maybe, but I am not sure, there is something that can be generalized from some individual cases.

I am happy to work with someone else to go through a couple of different IETF activities that did not really go as planned to "reconstruct" what went wrong. I suggested this in the past but it is of course not fashionable and exciting.

c) For a number of IETF activities it does not matter whether they take a long time because the deployment phase that happens afterwards will take 5 times longer (in the positive case). The timing matters and even if something takes much longer than expected it might still be too early or does not meet the expectations of the community. I would rather prefer to spent more time on a topic and do it properly (and by properly I do not only focus on the standardization work but also on the outreach) than to publish documents quickly to have good statistics. Finding a common understanding and reaching conclusions with many different parties just takes a long time. Finding an agreement among your close friends is easy. In essence, we do not only want "good" standards but we also want those that make the Internet work better.

Ciao
Hannes

PS: I just want to add that I still dislike DISCUSSes that make me re-write documents just because an English native speaker believes (probably rightfully so) that he knows how to write the text better (or at least in a different way). (hint, hint)

On 05/01/2013 06:33 PM, Jari Arkko wrote:
I wrote a blog article about how we do a fairly significant amount of
reviews and changes in the late stages of the IETF process. Next week
the IESG will be having a retreat in Dublin, Ireland. As we brought
this topic to our agenda, Pete and I wanted to raise the issue here
and call for feedback & ideas for improving the situation with all of
you.

http://www.ietf.org/blog/2013/05/balancing-the-process/

Jari