On Jul 20, 2013, at 5:47 PM, Hector Santos <hsantos(_at_)isdg(_dot_)net> wrote:
What generally happens when an individual I-D is submitted? Is there an
overseer of the submissions and decides there is something that interest the
IETF?
Hmm. Define "IETF". It is in some sense an organization (I call it a
"disorganization"), and in some sense a community of people. When we talk about
something being "interesting to the IETF", we're talking about it being
interesting to people.
To my knowledge, no. When I see a general individual submission (of which there
are more than a few; in my mirror, I have 2240 current drafts, of which the
identifiers of 1729 contain the identify of a working group, and 675 are
working group drafts, leaving 511 general submissions and 1054 individual
submissions to various working groups), it is usually because someone brought
it to my attention. In most cases, that means that they posted it without
specifically targeting a working group or targeting the wrong working group,
and are now shopping it around.
As a working group chair, I have mixed views on this. I'm certainly willing to
look at general submissions; v6ops will discuss two of them this time around,
one of which has been previously discussed in homenet and one has been
discussed in RIPE. However, I have tooling to help me manage my working group
that sees general submissions as noise. In the tool that updates and manages my
mirror, I have another tool that notices a new -00 draft whose name contains my
working group's identifier, and sends two emails, one to the working group
mailer advising the group of the draft and inviting discussion, and another to
the author(s) asking some pointed questions about it's applicability and
charter relevance. This way, it doesn't depend on my being at the top of my
game on the magic day, and it doesn't depend on the author contacting me; "I",
for some value of that word, initiate the conversation upon posting of the
draft. When I create my agenda, I have another tool that searches !
my mirror for drafts containing the identity of my working group and others I
add, and sorting them into four buckets - those older than the last IETF's date
and those newer, and within those, those with names that start with draft-ietf-
and those that don't. Looking at
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/search/?search_submit=&activeDrafts=on&name=v6ops&rfcs=on&sortBy=status,
which also looks for my working group's identity, I then manually reclassify
some of them as "in the IESG's processes" or "in the RFC Editor's queue", and
searching my mail database for the draft's base name (the name less the version
extension) allows me to look at the history of discussion of the specific
draft. The drafts that end up on my agenda have been written or updated since
the last meeting, are "in the working group", and have had supportive list
discussion. Anything else is a special case - and general submissions are
always special cases.
I can't speak for other chairs. I would imagine they do something similar, but
the way they do it is likely different.
So, if you don't know what working group your draft might be relevant to, by
all means submit it as a general submission (e.g., with a name like
"draft-<topic>-nn.txt"). When you have done so, it is your job to make people
that might be interested in it aware of it, and to promote discussion. If you
submit an individual submission to a working group (e.g., with a name like
"draft-santos-<wg>-<topic>-nn.txt"), the secretariat does not announce it to
the working group, but the working group chair should notice it at some point.
You are well advised to send a note to the working group mailer promoting
discussion. The only drafts that are automatically announced are working group
drafts (e.g., with a name like "draft-ietf-<wg>-<topic>-nn.txt").
By the way, if you submit draft-<topic>-00.txt and subsequently submit
draft-santos-<wg>-<topic>-00.txt, or submit draft-santos-<wg>-<topic>-nn.txt
and subsequently submit draft-ietf-<wg>-<topic>-00.txt, or in general change
the name of a draft, working group chairs appreciate your note to
internet-drafts(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org noting that "draft <this> replaces draft
<that>". It helps us track drafts, and know what's on our plate and what isn't.
As a matter of statistics, since March 11 and coming into IETF 87, we have had
704 new (-00) Internet Drafts, of which 129 have been working group drafts, 374
have been individual submissions to working groups, and (the difference) 201
have been general submissions. For IETF 86, the submission breakout by month
was:
individual
submission
to
working working general
group group
Nov 19 45 27
Dec 19 39 19
Jan 11 37 35
Feb 27 185 49
Mar 0 0 2
Which is to say that the vast majority of new drafts arrived more or less in a
block in February, and they were by and large individual submissions to working
groups. Oh, you wanted commentary, and you thought it was going to magically
happen? How many of those new drafts did you notice and comment on? The IETF
is, in this context, a community of people that read and comment on drafts...
Please note, all of that is about -00 drafts; I didn't look at updated drafts,
which would be about 2/3 of drafts at any given time.
The best analogy to describe this, perhaps, is a news boy in Time Square,
Trafalgar Square, or your favorite counterpart. You have a new idea or comment,
and it might be a very useful or important one. The square is noisy, and there
are a lot of people with comments that they think are important. We depend on
crowd sourcing. If a lot of people say "hey, this is interesting, we should
discuss it", we discuss it. If that doesn't happen... It's not because we like
you, or we don't like you. It's not about you, or where you come from, or
whatever. It's about whether your comment rises above the din. Trust me, area
directors and working group chairs do what they do, and are chosen to do what
they do, because they are interested, not because they want to prevent
progress. If you make a comment, think about what mailers or people it might be
appropriate to, and if that means creating a new working group or mailer
context, so be it, think about the area it belongs in and what area d!
irector might take you where you want to go. Communities interested in a topic
get attention. Create or contribute to one.