A couple of thoughts...
I'll buy #1.
On #2, when an AD posts a DISCUSS, s/he is now required to post a comment to the id tracker. I don't think you want the AD to have to write it twice. Coming back to a comment that was made earlier (and has been made on tools-discuss@xxxxxxxx, which IMHO is a better place to have this part of the discussion) what you want is an automated note sent to the WG mailing list (or in the case of an individual submission, to the authors) indicating that the draft's tracker entry has been updated and giving a URL to go read it.
On your third comment, which you didn't number, there has been a mechanism for resolving a pocket veto since about 1997 or 1998, when two different ADs in fact were carrying out pocket vetoes. One of them was doing so by not forwarding documents from his area to the IESG for review, and the nomcom eventually removed him. The other was placing a DISCUSS during the IESG review on then being non-responsive in the ensuing dialog. To deal with the latter case, the IESG adopted a procedure in which a restricted set of answers were acceptable: "YES" or "NO", no "DISCUSS", "ABSTAIN", or "NO OBJECTION". If two ADs voted "NO", the document was returned to the working group, and otherwise the "DISCUSS" was overridden. In my tenure, the procedure was never exercised, but it was threatened on occasion, and in the particular case (IIRC) the document was returned to the working group - it did in fact have some serious issues.
I have been looking at the following paragraph for a little while and rewording around one of our odd distinctions. Sometimes documents come to the IESG from a working group, and sometimes they come as individual submissions placed by one or more authors. What I want is the largest relevant inclusion - if a document comes from a working group, the comments should go to the working group, and if it comes as an individual submission it should go to all of the authors. I note this is not the current practice - I have had a number of discussions with ADs on documents submitted as personal submissions where I alone among the authors was addressed by an AD, and a number of discussions on WG documents where I alone or the set of authors was mentioned, but not the working group. But let me define a term: to me, for the purposes of discussion, a "working group" is the mailing list it uses or the assembled participants at an IETF meeting or interim working group meeting, and when a document is submitted personally by a set of authors, the "working group" is that entire set of authors. With that definition...
I think we need to give the ADs a little credit here. Your use of the terms "intractable" and "veto" make them sound pretty awful. In fact, when an AD feels that strongly about something, there is usually at least some merit to the position. What I would really prefer to see happen when things come to a head like that - which isn't all that often - is for the document to be returned to the WG, the AD to talk with the WG (in email or in person) about the issues, and work with the WG to come to closure on the issues.
On Apr 30, 2005, at 8:53 AM, Dave Crocker wrote:
I'd rather force DISCUSS to be very explicit about the reason, and be limited to the areas mentioned, but specifically prohibit last-pass edits of the sort that ought to happen during last call or within the WG.
Let me suggest that the rules be quite simple:
1. A Discuss may be asserted only when it pertains to a normative concern that involves the viability of the specification.
2. The AD raising the Discuss must post the details of their concern to the mailing list targeted to that specification and must provide clear direction as to how to cure the problem. Failing the ability to provide the detail about how to fix the specification, the AD must engage in a dialogue that has the goal of specifying that detail.
In order to deal with the issue of a pocket veto, whereby the AD is intractable but maintains the veto, there needs to be a mechanism to force review of the Discuss, either to assert that, indeed, it involves a valid showstopper (failure) of the specification or that it can be ignored.
d/ --- Dave Crocker Brandenburg InternetWorking +1.408.246.8253 dcrocker a t ... WE'VE MOVED to: www.bbiw.net
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