On Feb 18, 2017, at 6:59 PM, S Moonesamy <sm+ietf(_at_)elandsys(_dot_)com>
wrote:
It is up to the Working Group Chair and Responsible Area Director to assess
whether the WG output falls within the WG Charter.
This is technically true, but it's worth pointing out that working group
charters are approved first by the IETF, and only _then_ by the IESG. If the
IESG decides that the working group charter is much broader than the IETF
agreed it is, then that is a process failure.
In practice the IETF often leaves these issues entirely to the IESG, so in
practice this isn't necessarily a problem, but in principle it is, and you
can't know whether the IETF said nothing about a charter because we agreed with
the scope, or because we didn't look at it; in the former case, the IETF
actually does have a position on the scope of the charter—it's just unstated,
because it agrees with what was proposed. Going beyond that scope would
definitely be a process failure.