> > 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? in practice, they rarely serve that purpose. we're not in the habit of structuring our groups this way. > > 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. perhaps, but that doesn't mean we need to provide them with incubators, and that's what many groups end up doing. > Often, the fatal flaws will show up as the idea is > developed, so a lot of them go away without doing anything anyway. there is one important class of bad ideas that doesn't go away in IETF -- the class of bad ideas that is obviously bad from a wider perspective but which looks good to a set of people who are focused on a narrow problem. and in IETF what we often do with those ideas is to protect them and encourage development of them in isolation by giving them a working group. we sometimes even write those groups' charters in such a way as to discourage clue donation or discussion of other ways of solving the problem. Keith _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf