On May 16, 2013, at 5:00 PM 5/16/13, "Fred Baker (fred)"
<fred(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com> wrote:
On May 16, 2013, at 9:40 AM, Adrian Farrel
<adrian(_at_)olddog(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk> wrote:
On the whole, I am told that if an AD weighs in with her comments during
working
group last call, her fearsome personality may overwhelm some of the WG
participants and she may dominate the WG consensus.
There may be places where that happens, but I would be surprised if it
happened in my working group. I think it is fair to say that the AD (or an
IAB member, or someone who has recognized expertise on the topic) is likely
to be listened to more carefully than some others might. Heck, I'm careful
when I make a technical comment on a document in my working group, flagging
it with "</chair>" to ensure that it is seen as intended - a comment by a
competent practitioner of the art, not a process remark or an attempt to
trump some other view. Speaking personally, I would prefer to see those
comments in the WGLC, not IETF Last Call, if we can make that happen. For
example, I'd like to get directorate reviews done (gen-art, security
directorate, etc) in the timeframe of WGLC.
I think Fred is returning to an earlier theme here, when he asks for earlier
review.
Perhaps, as has been already suggested in this thread, we should think about
SIRSbis?
First, from draft-carpenter-icar-sirs-01:
The procedure described in this document is intended to
solve, or palliate, a number of related problems that
have been observed in the IETF process [PROBLEM]:
* submission of documents to the IESG that
still have significant problems (leading
to delay)
* failure to detect fundamental problems
and Internet- wide issues at an early
stage
Particularly because of the second point, it is
impossible to resolve these problems simply by
giving additional responsibility to working groups
themselves. An additional procedure is needed.
In my opinion, it's important to assign responsibility (and accountability) to
all WGs for producing publication-ready documents. I agree that some
additional work is needed before WGs send documents to the IESG. Perhaps we
can accomplish these goals through reorganizing the work we are
I suggest we might want to combine the need for more responsibility with the
discussion of a new "really close to being ready" document state. However,
rather than a new document state, suppose we codify the expectation that a
document that has passed WG last call is essentially ready-to-publish?
Correspondingly, any significant problems found in a document after WG last
call would be considered a serious defect.
Discussion: I realize that, elsewhere in this thread, it has been
asserted (or at least implied), that WGs already have this responsibility
and DISCUSSes on document are usually unnecessary. In practice, while
there may still be unnecessary DISCUSSes, my experience as AD was that
most DISCUSSes were appropriate and each one referred to a problem that
the WG had missed.
Let's get all the expert review possible - directorate, AD, cross-area - in the
WG last call review. What pops out *should* be ready for publication. Any
issues raised by these reviews in WG last call will be exposed to and can be
discussed by the WG at large, rather than being buried in the noise of IETF
last call discussions or being fixed in more focused discussions among the IESG
and the document authors. This procedure diverges some from
draft-carpenter-icar-sirs-01, in that it doesn't add a new form of review
process. Instead, it reschedules reviews that were going to take place anyway
earlier in the process, so there is little or no new work added to the document
publication process.
Perhaps the WG chairs would want to assign document shepherds earlier in the
process, as well, investing the document shepherds with the responsibility of
getting the right reviews and advising the WG chairs as to the readiness of the
document for advancement.
Any WGs willing to volunteer as experimental subjects? There is really no new
process to invent ... it's mostly a matter of realigning expectations and
responsibilities out to
- Ralph