I'll add to what John wrote below that we did discuss the potential for another layer of management between ADs and WGs during the IESG retreat (and that was actually before Keith's message).
It's clear that ADs have discretion to use directorates or technical advisors, but nobody felt that formalizing this as an official two-level system would have much benefit. So I guess we agreed with John.
Brian
John C Klensin wrote:
Keith,
This _is_ going to be a terse reply, since others have covered much of what I would have. But the topics are complex. Three observations...
(1) My observation about whining had more to do with the general tone of many of these discussions, in this round and earlier, rather than anything about what you may or may not have said specifically. Please don't take that categorization personally or, even generally, as more than a warning about S/N ratios and ways to make progress (or the lack thereof).
(2) We have repeatedly tried variations on this theme. The "area advisor" got that title because the secretariat couldn't modify the relevant templates to include both "responsible AD" (as we moved to two-AD areas with split, rather than shared, responsibility) and the notion of "someone senior who keeps a close eye on a WG, advising the chair and WG but reporting to the AD". A different variation might have been called "designated leadership developer/coach". I think these ideas have worked well sometimes and not at all in others. The fact that we have tried variations should not imply that we should avoid trying another, but may call for some serious thought about why the previous attempts have not always worked effectively.
(3) I've commented earlier on my concerns about adding intermediate layers of management or review and won't repeat those remarks here.
john
--On Saturday, 30 April, 2005 01:40 -0400 Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
wow...I keep wanting to make terse replies, but there never seems to be a way to address the subject with a short answer.
I'm sorry you see these explanations as whining. I believe that we have to recognize that part of our problem is how WGs operate before we can be willing to solve that problem. So I try to describe that problem in a way that people will recognize it. Maybe people already realize that we have this problem and I don't actually need to illustrate it.
As for solutions - I have been thinking about possible solutions for several years. But I'm much better at protocol engineering than I am at engineering management or social structures, so I don't have much confidence in my ideas for how to solve the problem.
Recently I've begun to suspect that a good answer to some of these problems might involve a layer of management between IESG and working groups - a set of people who had responsibility to give some technical oversight to working groups, monitor their progress, and keep the ADs up-to-date on the state of things. I say "oversight" rather than "direction" because "direction" would be too strong a term. I don't see the supervisor (let's call him a supervisor for now) ...
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