--On Saturday, July 15, 2023 17:51 -0400 Keith Moore
<moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 7/15/23 03:53, Carsten Bormann wrote:
>
>> (And, yes, I know of enough groups that try to do all their
>> work in weekly/bi-weekly calls,
>
> IMO, such groups should be suspended immediately. At a
> minimum their chairs should be replaced and their existing
> output subject to community wide review before the group is
> allowed to continue. That practice is exclusionary to a
> wide range of potential participants, and any "consensus"
> claimed from such a process is a poor joke.
>
> It's not the first time that an IETF WG has tried to operate
> in isolation while benefiting from IETF's presumed legitimacy
> for themselves. But whenever it happens it needs to be
> nipped in the bud.
Keith,
While I agree in principle --especially about the exclusionary
part-- I'm not nearly as rigid on this as you seem to be.
While I agree that it should not be a regular practice, I can
imagine situations, in these days when (I believe) a smaller
fraction of regular IETF participants with broad, cross-area,
knowledge and interests are coming to f2f meetings than
significantly before the pandemic, I think there are cases where
WGs can justify such meeting patterns for a while.
I do think, however, that such a WG should be required to
justify their need and reasoning to the community in the form of
a request; that the request should require explicit AD signoff;
that ADs, at their discretion, can require the same level of
community review required to approve a charter before signing
off; and that an AD signoff decision, like other AD actions,
should be subject to appeal to the full IESG, etc. I would hope
that such appeals would be very, very, rare but the way to avoid
them would be good explanations by the WGs and care (not just
trust) by the ADs.
After thinking about your note, I think such a request from a WG
should specify a fixed period of time along with the reasons and
that either a "continuing indefinitely" request or a request to
significantly extend that period of time once it was near or
after expiration should be subject to extra scrutiny.
Where we certainly agree is about the risks of a WG, especially
one with only a small number of active participants, doing its
work in a way that exclude other, less committed IETF
participants (frequent interims included, but there are other
ways) and then claiming IETF consensus for the results. Those
risks are exacerbated if the WG's subject matter is in any sense
out of the IETF mainstream, making the IETF Last Call process
less reliable and, often, more dependent on Area Review Team
members who may not understand the subject matter details and
hence miss important issues.
john
