Re: are we willing to do change how we do discussions in IETF? (was: moving from hosts to sponsors)

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On 25-jun-2006, at 6:18, Keith Moore wrote:

All too often, we (and I include myself here) shoot down ideas before they've had a fair hearing. We take an idea that is embryonic and - because we can _imagine_ that idea going somewhere that _might_ have a bad result - we do our best to kill it before it can breed. In this way we discard many good ideas not because they have no merit, but because they bring with them the potential to change things. The result is stagnation.

Are you the same Keith Moore as the one I was talking to ealier??

Trouble is, in our current process, there's rarely any formal request for feedback, and little external visibility of a WG's output, until Last Call.

That's what charters are for, aren't they?

But I see your point. When I first attended an IETF meeting I was surprised to see how inward looking wgs are. There is very little, if any, effort to present what the working group is doing to people outside of the wg.

So when I'm saying that working groups need multiple stages of formal, external review, what I'm really saying is that we need a structure for working groups in which we can have confidence that sufficient feedback will be obtained early enough to put good ideas on the right track and to see that truly bad ideas get weeded out in due time, most of the time.

Hm, I think trying to kill bad ideas is largely a waste of time. (Saying this both as someone who came up with some ideas that others think are bad and someone who has tried to convince others that their ideas are bad.) Often, the fatal flaws will show up as the idea is developed, so a lot of them go away without doing anything anyway.

The trouble is, that if someone develops a presumably bad idea in a draft, that draft is going to be deleted after six months. So the only way to keep that work around is to put it on a private website where it's probably going to be lost between the billions of pages that make up the web, or push for publication as an RFC. And like it or not, this lends a lot of credibility to an idea as most people don't understand the informational/experimental/standards track classification. It might make sense to create a third class of published documents that sits somewhere between draft and RFC. This would avoid the ridiculous situation where a draft is implemented and the email announcing its existance is archived, but the draft itself is deleted after some time.


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