I'm replying to Thomas's e-mail, but not particularly to Thomas - the
invitation is to anyone who can imagine "a better world" ...
If people want to keep leaning back on 10 year old process RFCs and arguing
"well thats just the way we've always done things around here" then this
organization is going to continue to slow its progress even more - and its
descent into irrelevancy. There are a lot of people here (myself included)
that want to evolve things because they think the IETF still has a lot to
offer the industry. But if the organization won't evolve, people will take
the path of least resistance and go elsewhere as they have been doing if
you haven't noticed.
As someone who has written a few BCPs that updated process docs that are at
least a decade old, I'd say, sure. But the best way to change things is to
write a draft proposing a change, and talk about it with people.
In the best case, people who can also imagine "a better world" will ask
awkward questions and make suggestions that will improve your proposal, and
things will get better for everyone, and we'll know how to manage the
updated process, etc.
The choices aren't binary (either engrave our process BCPs on an obelisk or
ignore them). I note that the Updates metadata for RFC 2026 says "Updated
by: 3667, 3668, 3932, 3979, 3978, 5378, 5657, 5742, 6410, 7100, 7127", and
that 2026 itself obsoleted 1602, which obsoleted 1310 (the title is "The
Internet Standards Process -- Revision 3", of course).
But please, give us something to consider that we can Last Call.
Spencer, as an AD who can sponsor proposals that make sense to him