On 5/15/2013 1:30 PM, Adrian Farrel wrote:
Suppose the AD raised her concern by writing a Comment or sending an email and
balloting "No Objection." That would mean that the I-D would be approved for
publication.
At this point either:
- the discussion goes on, but the document becomes an RFC anyway
or
- the responsible AD holds the document pending satisfactory completion of the
discussion.
I suggest that the former is a bad result.
Personally (but this may reflect my Discusses) I find that an active engagement
by the authors and the Discussing AD on the issue and the potential resolution,
always leads to speedy progression of the document either with the AD feeling
stupid, or the document improved. Both are adequate results.
Adrian,
I suggest we all take a look at the original text of the Subject field.
The problem here is that basic reviewing is being done by the ADs too
late in the process. We are making the mistake of having ADs be exempt
from IETF Last Call, and allowing them to be unprepared for the IESG
vote. So we are combining "education" with "voting". That's a paradigm
error.
By the time the IESG schedules the vote, ADs need to already have
educated themselves about the document.
Of course, the IESG discussion during the voting process well might
uncover an actual, serious issue with the document; this should be
exceptional and it should be an issue that the /IESG/ agrees needs to be
resolved and it means that voting should not take place until it is.
But that is quite different from the usual "let's talk about it" kind of
Discuss imposed by individual ADs.
So here's a simple proposal that pays attention to AD workload and
includes a simple efficiency hack:
When the IETF Last Call is issued, wait a few days, to see whether
any serious issues are raised by the community. The really serious ones
usually are raised quickly. If there are none, it's pretty certain the
document will advance to an IESG vote. That leaves 7-10 days of IETF
Last Call for ADs to get educated and ask questions, just like everyone
else.
Jari has expressed the goal of having AD concerns be raised more
publicly. Moving AD review and comment to the IETF Last Call venue
nicely accomplishes this, too.
On 5/15/2013 8:55 AM, Thomas Narten wrote:
> 1) Discuss criteria should be principles, not rigid rules. The details
> of the issue at hand always matter, and it will sometimes come down to
> judgement calls where reasonable individuals just might disagree.
We've been doing protocol specification for 40 years. If we can't
codify the major concerns that warrant blocking advancement of a
protocol, we're just being lazy. Really. That a given situation might
cause the IESG to decide to enhance the list does not mean that the list
shouldn't seek to be complete and precise and that ADs be held to it.
At every turn, the approach we've taken to the IESG review and approval
process is to limit actual accountability to the community. Everyone is
well-intentioned, but really this makes the process a matter of
personalities and not the rigor of serious professionalism.
The IESG's process is far, far better than it was 10-15 years ago, but
it still lacks meaningful predictability and serious accountability; it
is not reasonable for the process to require that authors and chairs
take the initiative of complaining when an AD is being problematic.
In terms of quality assurance, the idea that we have a process that
relies on the sudden insight of a single AD, at the end of a many-month
process, is broken. It's fine if that person sees something that
everyone else has missed until then, but that is quite different from
designing a process that is claimed to rely on it.
And of course, the reality is that we allow bad specs out the door all
the time; we just allow fewer of them than many/most other standards
bodies...
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net