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Re: Lessons from PROVREG WG was Re: IETF, ICANN and Whois...

2013-06-19 12:07:02
Looking back in hindsight, what would help is to have some means for the 
IETF to provide a maintenance vehicle for it's products.

I think there is some truth to this.

The reality has at times been that some WGs get a bit out of control
after they've been around a while, and getting them to deliver final
product is a challenge. Rather then finish a MIB or do the boring OAM
stuff that a real protocol needs, folk are much more interested in
develeping all sorts of extensions and other features. As such, ADs
often want to shut down the WG and make everyone go away.

The challenge of creating maintenance WGs is that unless handled well,
they become magnets for all the leftover and unfinshed (and often
uneeded) work and random individual drafts from the original WG. And
all the same players with all the same agendas are tempted to show up
at the new WG.

Maintenance WGs are definitely needed. And they need to be timed
correctly. Wait too long, and you miss the window of opportunity
during which folk are starting to implement/deploy, and you can still
fix the spec.

Successful maintenance WGs also need strong chairs and carefuly
crafted charters that keep them from becoming nuisance magnets. The
challenge in doing that I think keeps ADs from chartering such WGs in
some cases when a WG really is needed.

Even today, there are maintenance WGs that have issues. They can be
identified by the ratio of mail/drafts/discussion to the actual
importance of the problem purported to being solved.

Thomas

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