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Re: Content-free Last Call comments

2013-06-11 07:00:00
On 6/11/2013 6:36 AM, Dave Cridland wrote:
I think this is, in part, due to the question asked.

The IETF's Last Call announcement presumes much on the part of those
reading it. You're aiming to solicit something that's not asked for.

Compare and contrast with the XSF's Last Call announcements, in

Re-formulating the LC text sounds like an excellent idea, to call for more substantive comments.


I'd suggest that putting together a set of five questions you're hoping
to have answered would be sensible and useful.

Perhaps:


If we want the statements of support to be meaningful, they need to have the creator of the statement do some real work -- more than mechanically checking boxes -- demonstrating the 'understanding' that Lloyd suggests. Multiple guess questions don't demonstrate understanding; worse, they are too easily plagiarized as part of a campaign.

One of the unfortunate realities in the current IETF is periodically seeing patterns of support that have more to do with politicking for a draft than for commenting on a critical review of it. There is no perfect protection against this, but asking each statement of support to demonstrate the commenter's own understanding will help.

We also sometimes have drafts that have had little working group activity. This is independent of the quality of the work, but it means that there's little sense of community need or interest. It's not supposed to happen, but it's become more common in the current IETF. Again, there's no perfect protection against that, but seeing public activity during IETF LC that demonstrates enough community interest to do the minimal work of offering a capsule commentary on the draft will help.

d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net