On 3/24/24 08:34, S Moonesamy wrote:
I have generally found that WG deadlines were often set without much appreciation for the difficulty in sorting out the technical problems. (No opinion about whether that was true for the documents you're referring to here.)I don't think it's possible to reliably establish that the people showing interest in a WG's deliverables (for the present or future) are okay with a particular set of practices. Even if a WG explicitly asks everyone on its mailing list for their consent to a change in the rules, new participants may join at any time, and it's not desirable to exclude or discourage new participants.
There is a misunderstanding of the requirement/rule. There are requirements/rules which I cannot change, e.g. the Last-Call shall be two weeks.
Sometimes, a practice (sorry if it is not the correct word) is set by agreement when the WG starts its work. I found it useful as it allows the WG to meet its target date for delivering the I-D to the AD. For what it is worth, I have been off by six months on a target date. All the RFCs which I shepherded were published in under three years.
Over the years, I only received one complaint about the exclusion of participants. The person who filed the complaint had a point. However, the point was something to do with IETF policy (which is something which I could not change).
The question which John asked for about documents to be discussed at a meeting. A person, irrespective of characteristics, who comes to the meeting could protest if a rule was violated.
I have pretty strong opinions about interim meetings based on my own experience while on IESG, in which one WG in particular was holding interim meetings without broad public notice and only to the WG mailing list. I found that this WG was hostile to outside input and that this was detrimental to the quality of their output. I still find that WG's output to be of very low quality and to impair interoperability to this very day. And I believe that the complexity of the spec that they produced discourages additional implementation which might improve reliability for users.One of my big concerns about working groups, especially these days, is that there seems to be an increasing tendency for WGs to operate as closed clubs. They can't stop new people from joining their mailing lists or their publicly announced meetings, but they can discourage participation from newcomers in various ways. Holding "interim" meetings (whether remote or in-person) without community-wide announcement in the usual means (e.g. ietf-announce) is certainly one way they can do that. Having the chair or other designee object to any suggestion by an "outsider" is another way. It's absolutely NOT okay for a WG to operate in that way, even if some of the core participants think it's ok.
As a comment on interim meetings, there is a decision by the IAB at: https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/iab/appeals/artifact/39
But on rereading IESG's current guidance, the only thing that really bugs me is that they permit frequent online interim meetings and that they only consider the current set of WG participants' interests, and not so much the interests of potential participants from outside the current WG. I continue to believe that IETF needs to facilitate broad participation and needs to discourage working groups operating as effectively closed clubs, by whatever mechanisms they use (including making disparaging remarks about non-regular participants who show up at meetings, as I've seen done). I don't think that the current set of WG participants are the only set of potential participants whose interests need to be considered in making scheduling decisions for a WG. I also don't think that mere "discussion" of proposed meetings with the responsible AD is adequate, but I expect that in practice a WG is unlikely to meet over the AD's objection.
Keith
