On 7/22/15 11:02 AM, John C Klensin wrote:
(1) We did not hesitate to shut them down if they were
not productive. I don't want a rigid rule because I
think we all know that, in practice, some WGs move at a
different pace than others, but it is important that we
be able to recognize "not meeting expectations and
making reasonable progress" and act on it.
My mental model for how-things-work in the IETF is based on
the working group secretaries situation - there was a sense
that working group chairs were overloaded and in some cases
not doing their jobs, and rather than remove a non-functioning
chair or add another chair, a decision was made to add a new
role (wg secretary) and an effort to formalize that role.
That is to say, when things aren't working we tend to add
more structure and more layers rather than removing structure
and layers. Because this tends to happen, I am going to find
it difficult to support a process change that is structured
around an assumption that when things go badly groups will
be shut down and chairs will be fired.
I basically like this proposal, although I'm going to tend
to like any proposal that reduces leadership workload and
that pushes a chartering decision back beyond the point at
which a typical working group transitions from initial
enthusiasm to committed core. But I think we need to deal
with the IETF as it is, which means a growing core of
professional standardizers among both the participant and
leadership (suggesting that people will basically work on
anything, regardless of actual utility) and a predisposition
to add goo rather than to remove it and against saying "no"
to established efforts and chairs (which also goes to
your fourth criterion, that sunk effort is not a guarantee of
publication or standardization).
Melinda