> Working groups have a charter, which I think should be viewed as a contract > for what the working group will work on / develop. yup. in fact, the language you use is commonly used to describe the charter and to justify being so forceful in making it clear and plausible. > When a working group > wants to adopt a new draft, they need to have permission from the AD and may > even need to revise the charter to be able to adopt the work. This is exactly the wrong direction to take things. ADs are massively overworked. Back last year (and the 3 years before ) when the IETF was claiming to be working on improving quality and productivity, there seemed to be pretty clear consensus that we wanted to move more things down to the working group chair, not up to the AD. ADs are inherently a bottle-neck. This is structural, so it does not get better by getting "better" ADs (whatever that means). After chartering, an AD's working group oversight should be for review, not for participating in getting the work done. > I don't see it as a binding contract, but it does imply that the draft > should progress. Making it binding and enforcing it strictly would keep working groups far more attentive to scope and schedule. (Assuming the charter is written well...) d/ -- Dave Crocker Brandenburg InternetWorking +1.408.246.8253 dcrocker a t ... WE'VE MOVED to: www.bbiw.net _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf