On Sun, Feb 13, 2022 at 4:42 PM Michael Richardson <mcr+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Having a non-WG-Chair as shepherd is particularly useful if one, or
> even both, chairs are authors of the draft in question. In that case it
> avoids a tricky conflict of interest. In other cases it simply spreads
> the workload, if a WG has many documents reaching maturity at the same
> time.
My view is that the most valuable thing is that it exposes more people to the
process. They become possible WG chair candidates, if not in that WG, then
perhaps another.
Yup. I think that there are 2 really valuable aspects of having non-chairs be shepherds:
1: It's an easy way for people to get more experience with the process - they see how the sausage is made, and that there really isn't any magic. They then are much more likely to be willing (and good!) chairs.
but also
2: it provides a really valuable second set of eyes. In many cases the shepherd notices something that the chairs had overlooked, or where they may have (probably unintentionally) over-judged consensus or otherwise allowed their biases to influence the outcome.
A third aspect is that it also takes some load off of the chairs (which also makes more people willing and able to chair)
I would really like to find a way to raise the profile of the shepherd, and
make it something that people aspire to.
Yup. I fairly regularly ask my chairs to please ask for volunteers to shepherd -- this hasn't proved to be especially effective. Chairs do ask, but often have a hard time getting volunteers (and often it's easier for them to just ask once or twice and then start doing them themselves).
Some of this is that many people aren't really sure how much work it is, some of this is small concerns about potentially offending the chair ("Srsly!? You thought that *that* was consensus?!"), but much of it is also that there isn't much / any incentive for taking on the extra work.
A while back I'd had some discussions, and was planning on asking all of the authors in my area to please add something to the acknowledgements section along the lines of:
"Thanks to Sophia Adamos being the Document Shepherd for this document, and to Ige Ayaan and Amira Mitchel for chairing the WG" -- I believe that the acknowledgement section belongs to the authors, and so they could always just say "No...".
I *do* think that it is important / useful to also thank the chairs -- it is sometimes hard to find people willing to serve as chairs (or the people who are willing might be obviously conflicted), and, apart from just being polite, thanking people may make it easier for them to justify their time.
All of this morphed into discussions on having a standard section which listed the document shepherd and chairs, but that fell into drama (and I became distracted :-)).
I'm planning on reviving the general idea of asking the authors to please add a sentence or two thanking the shepherds. Can't hurt...
W
--
Michael Richardson <mcr+IETF@xxxxxxxxxxxx> . o O ( IPv6 IøT consulting )
Sandelman Software Works Inc, Ottawa and Worldwide
The computing scientist’s main challenge is not to get confused by the
complexities of his own making.
-- E. W. Dijkstra
complexities of his own making.
-- E. W. Dijkstra
