what happened to newtrk?

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All,

As a participant in the newtrk working group and someone who actually
ran one of the only reasonably successful experiments in that group, I
think the community is owed a better accounting of why WG failed, and
that steps should be taken to see that such efforts do not fail in the
future.  The newtrk working group was chartered to revise the standards
track, with an understanding that the current one is demonstrably not
working as it should.  As I've previously mentioned, few if any
specifications get to draft or full standard, and no review of PS had
ever been done along the timelines specified in RFC 2026.

Numerous proposals were made within the working group.  The ISD proposal
seemed to be the one that had the most support.  However, this proposal
ran into stiff opposition within the IESG and was effectively killed. 
We can argue until the cows come home as to whether or not the ISD
proposal was ready for prime time.  However, the end result was that we
had a working group chartered to do a specific task, do the task, and
then have the work rejected.  Quite frankly we don't have the resources
to have that happen.  I suspect anyone who had any involvement with that
group will be extremely reticent to work on process proposals in the
future, because they will assume that any given IESG is likely to reject
any output.

What I would like to know is what we could have done to prevent this
from happening.  Was the newtrk charter not sufficiently narrow to
accomplish a task for which there was community consensus?  Is a working
group the appropriate place to make process changes?  I am leaning
heavily toward "no" on that last one.  Should the IESG simply both
propose and dispose?  Perhaps the IAB has a role of proposing changes.

Eventually, as I wrote in a previous note, we must circle back and
actually fix the standards process to reflect reality.  But how that is
to be done remains to me an open question.

Eliot

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