Fred, > On #2, when an AD posts a DISCUSS, s/he is now required to post a comment > ... what you want is an automated note sent to the WG sounds dandy. > On your third comment, which you didn't number, there has been a mechanism > for resolving a pocket veto since about 1997 or 1998, ... 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. thanks for clarifying this. is it documented somewhere public? i wandered around the ietf.org site but didn't trip across it. > 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'll see your largeness and raise you one: all documents subject to iesg review should have a cited venue for open public discussion. Given that such documents get an IETF-wide Last Call, it seems reasonable to direct folks somewhere other than the ietf mailing list. And that's were the AD comments should go, too, I think. > But let me define a term: to me, for the purposes of > discussion, a "working group" is ... ok. > 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. FWIW I fully understand that and have chosen them intentionally. I am trying to discuss a situation constrained by a narrow set of conditions and, yes, the situation is indeed awful. It is also a real and periodic part of the IETF landscape -- and it has been going back to pre-Kobe. In fact, it is related to what I believe was at the core of the chronic discontent that led to the Kobe revolt. And that's why I see the issue as fundamentally structural, rather than personal. It happens too regularly, across too many different personalities -- most of whom have otherwise excellent track records -- to believe that this is just a matter of a random AD going astray. We are talking about conditions that we all hope are at the boundary. Unfortunately there seems to be pretty solid community consensus that it does occur. So, I am focusing on the case of an AD being the problem. There are, of course, cases where working groups are the problem -- which is, after all, why we need to retain meaningful late-stage review and, yes, refusal. But that is not my focus at the moment. In this AD-at-the-boundary condition, the perception from the outside is that the AD is being intractable. It does not matter that the AD is certain to think they are trying to do good things. What matters is that valid attempts to resolve matters do not make progress and that there is strong indication that the problem is the AD and not the working group. In these cases, the effect of that AD's "discuss" is really a pure veto. >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. That's not when things come to a head. We used to have a problem getting the objecting AD to talk with the working group but my sense is that that is not a problem anymore. So, I consider public followup with the working group, by the AD, to a natural and obligatory step immediately after the Discuss and, from what I can tell, it happens regularly. So, that's not the problem. The problem is after that, when there are legitimate efforts by the working group to understand and resolve matters. However they are not able to for any of the usual array of reasons that legitimately permit characterizing the AD as being intractable. This is what the override procedure you have described appears to be designed to deal with. So it's good to hear about it. 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