Re: project management (from Town Hall meeting)

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I doubt that this is going to solve anything.  All basic project management
techniques assume that a project has a deadline and that the people working

We do have deadlines: charters, and external customers (implementors, other SDOs).

on it have some incentive to get the work done.  This is not the case for
ID's: we continue working on them until there is rough consensus, no matter
how long it takes.  The authors are volunteers, if other activities pop up
and work on the ID has to be postponed, there is nothing the WG chair can
do.

This is not quite true: authors are not volunteers in the normal soup-kitchen-volunteer sense. In most cases, authors are paid by their companies to do the work. This is not a hobby for most contributors. Even more classical volunteer organizations, like IEEE (the non-standards-part) and ACM, set deadlines and have mechanisms to deal with volunteers (true volunteers in that case) that can no longer perform. For example, journals routinely drop editors that don't perform their (unpaid, volunteer) duties.


This is another result of doing work with volunteers.  If somebody is
interested in a topic but not in another, then there is nothing that
can stop him from working on the first topic, even if it might be
beneficial for overall progress to finish the topic first.

Part of managing for success in any "volunteer" organization is to channel volunteer energy.

Henning

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