On Feb 18, 2017, at 7:41 PM, Ted Lemon <mellon(_at_)fugue(_dot_)com> wrote:
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.
Joel Halpern pointed out privately that I somewhat misrepresented the process
here. The IETF review process for working group charters does not require
that there be IETF consensus to approve the charter. This is true,
butdoesn't actually refute my claim that it is a process failure if the IESG
approves a charter and then allows a working group to do work that exceeds the
bounds of the charter. That _is_ a process failure, in the simple literal
sense that the process did not produce the right outcome: the IETF community
was not given an opportunity to review the charter that would have included the
work that was done. If we think that's okay, why do we have working group
charters at all?
The way the process _should_ have gone in this case is that when the IESG
noticed that new work needed to be done by a particular working group, they
updated the charter to reflect that, and got IETF review of the updated
charter. In this case, you are right that if the IETF community was clearly
opposed to the new work, the IESG could still approve the charter. But this
would be extraordinary.
And this is why the IETF community shouldn't treat charter updates as pro
forma. Charter review is an important part of the feedback mechanism that
keeps the IETF a consensus-driven organization. Doing out-of-charter work, or
lawyering the charter to say that work that really isn't part of the intent of
the charter nevertheless conforms to the letter of the charter, bypasses this
important step.