Jerry,
We all want to increase throughput and quality simultaneously, but we need to look at facts before jumping to conclusions.
It's certainly true that if the technical quality of documents coming out of WGs was better, IESG review *and the subsequent process to rectify the document* would be quicker. If the linguistic quality was better, they would spend less time in the RFC Editor process. But unfortunately the IESG still receives a fair number of documents with fairly serious technical issues and/or serious editorial issues. As long as that is true, I really don't see how we can take away the IESG's responsibility as the back stop for quality, especially for cross-area issues.
However, you're fundamentally correct that the solution lies in the WGs. If WGs produce output that is truly ready to ship, it will get shipped quicker, whatever the formal path.
Brian
Ash, Gerald R (Jerry), ALABS wrote:
IMO the major problem to be solved is IETF throughput, takes far too long to produce RFCs, **years**, and getting worse. Unacceptably long for users of the standards. IESG is a bottleneck, well known, stated in RFC 3773 http://ietf.org/rfc/rfc3774.txt?number=3774, Section 2.6.2 "Workload of the IESG"
There are 2 issues to be solved wrt throughput:
1. needs to be vastly increased 2. with no loss in current quality
Candidate solution: 1. WG takes over full responsibility for RFC production ==> parallel
processing
2. IESG maintains RFC quality with uniform WG process created,
maintained, and enforced by IESG.
The PROTO team has a 'shepherding' proposal to offload some of the RFC approval work to WGs. IMO this doesn't go far enough to offload the IESG sufficiently to eliminate the IESG bottleneck and create a parallel process at the WG level.
WG procedures would be developed to ensure RFC quality. The procedures would be created, maintained, and enforced by the IESG. WGs I participate in are mostly competent and thorough in RFC production, necessary cross-WG review is done, etc. Many comments on this thread that this quality isn't uniform across WGs, and needs to be.
I see no reason this couldn't be made to work, proof is that it works like this, successfully, in other SDOs.
Jerry Ash
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