> > I think that the single change most likely to keep WGs on track is to ensure > > that they do not have a single dominant participant, eg one who is both chair and > > author of key I-Ds. The WGs I see most at risk of going round in circles and/or > > producing output that falls short of what is needed are ones such. > > Some time ago, I did hear an IESG member talk of this in such a way as to make > > me think that this was an understood problem, but nothing seems to have changed > > in the two or so years since then. > Perhaps it is an unwritten rule, but I thought this battle was fought > and won years ago. Perhaps you should discuss the specific problem with > the AD and or the IESG. I can't recall the last time I was involved in > a group in which the chair played an active role in authoring. And as > someone who did that way many years ago, I strongly advise against it. This is exactly my take as well. I've seen many cases where a chair has refused to become a document author or editor in a group because of the conflict it creates. I've also seen at least one case where a chair stepped down in order to become a document author. Of course there are exceptions. The obvious ones are that the conflict is much more limited when there's a non-aothor co-chair, the authorship role is limited to a small subset of the group's documents, or both. For example, I was asked to co-chair the NNTPEXT group in large part because the other co-chair was also the main document author. (I note in passing that in this case we ended up with both roles being done by other people.) In another case, I once tried to weasle out of writing a specification (now RFC 2034) because at the time I was co-chair of the NOTARY group. But the feedback from all concerned was that it one small ancillary document and I was a only the co-chair, and I was, um, persuaded to do the work. > > And, of course, I believe that there is more to good engineering than just > > engineering eg the right processes. > Ding ding! Ditto. Ned _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf