Ned Freed wrote:
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.
Exactly.
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.)
Without commenting on the specific case, I think that co-chairs may be the
right solution when one of the chairs is an author of a fraction of the
documents, but not usually when s/he is *the* main author. In that situation,
the author+chair can never make a consensus call, so effectively is recused from
the most important part of chairing.
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.
Exactly.
Brian
And, of course, I believe that there is more to good engineering than just
engineering eg the right processes.
Ding ding!
Ditto.
Ned
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