At the Wednesday plenary in Minneapolis a discussion on improving cross-functional document review was started (please see [Ref1]). We talked about several proposals initiated within the wider community [Ref2, Ref3], and outlined a few proposals that came from the IESG members [Ref4, Ref5, Ref6]. As a result of the discussion we received a fair level of the support from the community. We believe that there is a rough consensus within the community that pursuing this direction is a good idea. To ensure continuous progress on this matter, we would like to better organize the discussion and create a forum where the details of the final set of improved cross-functional review mechanisms would be worked out and documented. The IESG is considering creation of a WG within the General Area dedicated to this topic. Information on the mailing list and main goals of the WG is given below. The first item for discussion on the mailing list will be the WG charter. WG name: icar (improved cross-area review) Mailing list: icar@ietf.org Subscription: icar-request@ietf.org Archives : https://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/working-groups/icar/current/maillist.html WG objective: Work out mechanisms for improved cross-functional review within the IETF. This includes a better peer-to-peer community review, as well as more structured (formal) pre-IESG review that may be used to improve scalability of the IESG review function. It is an explicit goal of the WG to come up with mechanisms encouraging earlier review of the documents. An early review is best for catching architectural problems while they're still relatively easy to solve. In particular, many cross-area interactions can be spotted and dealt with, thus avoiding many "late surprises". A final review can catch remaining cross-area interactions, as well as deal with overall quality issues. The WG will cooperate with others in starting and evaluating experiments with both early reviews and structured reviews. The evaluation of such experiments may be published as Informational RFCs if the group so desires. WG milestones: FEB 2004: Submit -00 draft on improved peer-to-peer community review FEB 2004: Submit -00 draft on improved structured review SEP 2004: Submit draft on improved peer-to-peer community review to the IESG for publication as BCP SEP 2004: Submit draft on improved structured community review to the IESG for publication as BCP SEP 2005: Evaluate WG progress and potential; close or recharter Comments on the proposed WG objective and milestones are welcome. -- References: [Ref1] Slides on cross-functional review from the plenary http://www.alvestrand.no/ietf/nov2003-minneapolis/ [Ref2] draft-carpenter-solution-sirs-01.txt [Ref3] draft-allman-problem-wg-revcomm-00.txt [Ref4] draft-iesg-hardie-outline-01.txt [Ref5] draft-iesg-alvestrand-twolevel-00.txt [Ref6] draft-zinin-early-review-00.txt
