> I am not personally a fan of term limits -- they have significant > downsides. What are those downsides, for the situation under discussion? > And, yes, I know that the result of this could be insulting to some > under-performaing chairs, including me. Which means that it would be nice to find a way to deal with the current concerns that does not run into the considerable and mutual pain of a rejection process. > One possible tool to consider is a "slip chart" which plots the > estimated date of delivery against the date the estimate is made. We need to be careful that we do not focus on creation of clever tools while ignoring more strategic -- and frankly pretty simple -- issues: 1. An IETF effort that succeeds does so because of substantial community need and activity. If either are lacking, the effort will fail. 2. For something on the scale of the Internet, "substantial community" must almost always translate into a big number. If an IETF effort cannot muster such levels of involvement, it needs to question whether the work really is appropriate for the global Internet. 3. The concept of rough consensus means that no one person is essential. Neither to contribute nor to veto. This should translate into the ability to replace chairs easily. 4. If an effort cannot come up with alternative chairs reasonably easily, again we need to question the appropriateness of the effort. 5. The question of whether a working group is making timely and productive progress ought to be pretty easy to assess. Milestones are relevant, but careful analysis is probably not nearly as important as seeing whether it just plain "feels" productive. Consequently, automatically (not conditionally) replacing chairs every two years is actually a pretty reasonable idea. Similarly a zero-based working group renewal process every two years makes quite a lot of sense. In other words, the assumption is that it won't get renewed. The working group needs to make a case that its efforts have been productive enough to warrant continuation. To date, we treat most of the IETF process as uinsg free resources. Hence we do no real scheduling of valuable resources, except by fifo and congestion behaviors. Is that really any way to run a major standards group? 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