--On Wednesday, November 11, 2015 16:11 -0500 Kathleen Moriarty
<kathleen(_dot_)moriarty(_dot_)ietf(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
I think that if we want to reduce the load of Area Directors,
getting to the point where working groups advance documents
that doesn't generate discusses is an element of reducing
the work load on area directors.
This would be very helpful. I think most of us enjoy reading
drafts when they are well written and well reviewed for
technical problems.
Two observations about this part of the discussion, leaving
other parts aside:
(1) The desire to have WGs produce good-quality drafts and its
corollary that only those WGs should exist that will produce
good-quality drafts is, at least in my observations, one of the
factors that has produced the very long and drawn out process
for getting WGs chartered. That process, in turn, produces some
of the sense of entitlement to get anything the WG agrees on and
recommends (even if by inattention) published. That, in turn,
appears to me to be one of the causes of the IESG getting
poor-quality documents, tuning them to eliminate the most
obviously problematic text, and then letting the results be
published. Lots of us object to both the very long creation
times and to the IETF publishing poor quality standards track
specs, but we need to understand that there are tradeoffs among
undesirable options and cause and effect relationships involved.
(2) I question where "few DISCUSSes" is a good measure of
quality. One way to get a draft through with few DISCUSSes is
to make it very long and about some very narrow and focused
topic, especially when it is a topic about which few people care
and they are all part of the development process. The first
thing that happens, at least absent a very strong and
independent WG Chair (difficult because there are few volunteers
for the position in specialized WGs who aren't part of the core
group, aka "cabal"), is that anyone in the WG who is not part of
that core group tunes out. The second step is that the IESG
gets a shepherd's report that says "good document, wide WG
consensus (after all, no one spoke against it), no issues". A
few diligent ADs look through the document, find nits to pick
and go on record about them to prove that they are doing their
jobs, but the approach almost assures that there is little
substantive review of the document outside the group that
created it (whether it is actually high quality or not) and
hence few DISCUSSes, at least about anything critical to the
proposal or spec. A variation on the same theme involves
documents developed outside the IETF by some relatively closed
and tight-knit group, deployed, and then brought to the IETF for
approval with great resistance to changes because there is
already deployed running code.. If the IESG allows such a
proposal to be turned into a WG (or some ADs is willing to allow
it to be pushed through as an individual submission), there is
no practical chance in today's environment of getting though
IETF LC and then saying "no" or "go back to first principles and
redesign the thing". Whether we then see a significant number
of DISCUSS positions depends more or whether some ADs feel a
need to make a statement (even if about process rather than
document specifics) or just prefer that the spec slide through
and disappear from their radar.
john