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Re: PS to IS question from plenary

2013-07-30 15:19:37
On 31/07/2013 06:27, John C Klensin wrote:

--On Tuesday, July 30, 2013 16:41 +0200 IETF Chair
<chair(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org> wrote:

Last night there was a question in the plenary about how many
PS->IS transitions have occurred since RFC 6410 was published
in October 2011. That RFC changed the three-step standards
process to two steps. There was also a question of how this
compared to previous times before that RFC got approved.

Looking at the timeframe from October 2011 to today (22
months), there have been four such protocol actions. These
results are given by searching the IETF Announce mail archive:
...
Prior to the publication of RFC 6410, in the preceding 22
months there were these 20 actions raising standards to either
Draft Standard or Full Standard:
...
I should insert here the Standard disclaimer about possibly
faulty search methodology or records, misunderstanding the
question, or the hasty interpretation of results. In
particular, the above search was not easy on ARO, involved
manual steps, and I might have easily missed something. And I
wish I had been able to do a database query instead. Feel free
to repeat & verify my results...

Jari,

Thanks for this.

Disclaimers and possible small classification errors aside and
being careful to avoid making causal assumptions, I believe that
the implication of the above is that there is no evidence that
the 3 -> 2 transition has increased the number of documents
being moved or promoted out of Proposed Standard.   If one were
to assume a causal relationship and an absence of external
confounding variates or processes, one might even conclude the
the 3 -> 2 transition has made things quite a lot worse.
Conversely, it seems to me that one could argue that the change
has made things better only by demonstrating the existence of a
process that would have led to considerably fewer than four
documents being moved out of Proposed Standard in the last 22
months in the absence of the change.

While the apparently-significant reduction in documents moved
out of Proposed Standard is far worse than we expected, is it
time for Scott Bradner and myself to review
draft-bradner-restore-proposed-00, issue a new version, and
start a serious discussion about that model of a solution?
Would be willing to sponsor such a draft or, if you prefer,
organize a WG or equivalent to consider it?

I would rephrase it as performing the inverse operation to RFC 4450.
I don't think it needs to be a fully-fledged experiment under RFC 3933;
just a large batch of PS->IS promotions in one go under RFC 6410.

It is a good idea.

    Brian