Pekka Savola wrote:
On Fri, 6 May 2005, Ralph Droms wrote:
What is the context of technical astuteness? How do you compare
people with different technical focuses? You can't.
Giving ADs a private veto (private in the sense of not discussed in
public) seems to compare technical astuteness and assign more weight to
ADs. I suggest public discussion avoids giving ADs' technical
astuteness undue weight.
If an AD raises an issue about a document (from area X) that it
conflicts or causes serious problems (from the perspective of area Y),
how do you ensure that the more technically astute people
(particularly on Y but also a bit on X) participate in the discussion?
By making the discussion public...
[...]
There is nothing to prevent making such discussions public. Many groups
already do so so; the comments are already recorded in a public
database, and when the WG (chair or document editor) follows up on
those, e.g., by discussing the Discuss, it can be done Cc'ing the
mailing list.
Or do you have the problem that the discussion is held on the WG list
(and not on a wider forum), and for individual submissions, probably in
private? (individual submissions are problematic in this sense, but they
_are_ individual..)
So I don't see what problem you're seeing. To me, a Discuss is a flag
an AD can raise "I think there may be a serious issue here, and we need
to discuss it in case you disagree".
Definitely, there aren't supposed to be any private vetos these days.
Even for individual submissions, the DISCUSS texts if any will be visible
in the tracker, at least.
In principle, I consider that reasonable given the responsibily of the
IESG for technical quality.
But the WGs are *primarily* responsible for quality. The better the
WG output, the less the IESG will be seen as a blockage.
However, sometimes this has some issues. Specifically, sometimes ADs
seem to be very busy and do not have time to respond to attempts at
initiating dialogue or the round-trip time between messages is high.
(Also, there are cases where the WG drops the ball for months, and then
gets back later -- by then the AD has probably already forgotten what
(s)he said and has to re-read parts of the spec.) This is a particular
problem if the WG thinks AD's issue is not really relevant or is flat
out wrong; it may take a while to convince the AD (though the
responsible AD may be able to help in these scenarios).
When everyone involved is overloaded and impatient, this can happen,
and I don't see any general solution, except for the PROTO shepherd
to be on the job every day. Since the PROTO solution is new, it's too
soon to say whether this is working.
Brian
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