Since the Atlanta IETF, the IESG has been evaluating community feedback
on the sub-IP area.
It is clear that the community is quite divided on the subject, with a
number of people speaking out against making this area permanent, a
number of people speaking out in favour of keeping an organization
format that seems to be working, and a number of people pointing out
various issues with the current situation.
At the same time, there are a wide-ranging discussions of more basic
IETF structural problems, which may very well lead to a wider
reconsideration of the area structure of the IETF. Also, the nomcom
process is set to make its recommendations for IESG members before the
next IETF meeting.
One suggestion that has been made is to create a "temporary AD" with a
tenure of one year. The IESG does not believe this makes sense in
practice, as we have observed that it often takes 6 months or more for
someone to come up to speed on all the aspects of an IESG member's job,
which is too long for an appointment that is only intended to last one
year.
In this situation, the IESG has come to the following conclusion:
- We will NOT close the sub-IP area by March 2003.
We will instead encourage the WGs that we think are nearly finished
to finish up their work, work further with the architecture of the
"sub-IP" technologies, and, together with the participants, try to
find the optimal solutions for the management of the working groups.
- We will NOT ask for a new AD for the area. We will instead look at
the composition of the IESG after March, and determine then which
are the best ADs to take on the additional burden of shepherding
the sub-IP area.
The IESG will continue to evaluate the situation, based on community
input, and revisit the issue in March 2003. If the likely outcome is
that the area will have only 2 or 3 working groups by the end of 2003,
the IESG will propose a transition schedule for migrating unclosed
Working Groups and shutting down the area.
If there appears to be significant reason for expanding work in this
area, without going outside the boundaries of the areas for which the
IETF has traditionally been able to contribute significantly to, the
IESG may choose a different strategy at that time.
Harald Alvestrand
For the IESG
