When is a DISCUSS really a discussion?

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and, now for something completely different ...

One thing I've noticed in sitting quietly and typing IESG telechat narrative minutes is that a DISCUSS is a living thing.

- Sometimes a DISCUSS starts out as "this can't be right", and morphs into "the working group really thinks it's OK to blow off congestion and security".

- Sometimes a single AD's DISCUSS text changes - maybe more than once. So to talk about "<insert name here>'s DISCUSS on ip-over-hamsters" isn't always precise.

- Sometimes a DISCUSS starts out as a really big DISCUSS, that becomes a big COMMENT and a short DISCUSS. There are IESG members who challenge specific points of a DISCUSS - not sure I've heard all of them do it, but it's pretty common.

- Sometimes a COMMENT becomes a DISCUSS because another DISCUSS becomes a COMMENT. Sometimes a DISCUSS becomes a COMMENT because the AD couldn't cast the 11th DISCUSS on one document ("not a good use of AD time").

There are certainly other paths through the maze to the cheese, but you get my drift.

So, what I would suggest is that people stop stroking out about the (amazingly high) number of documents that collect DISCUSS ballots, and focus on documents that don't clear DISCUSS in two (or some other small number of) telechat cycles.

Or some other metric. But just because you get a DISCUSS, doesn't mean you have a problem that takes more than a few minutes to work out. You may, but that's where we should focus.

What follows is from a little more than a year of IESG telechat narrative scribing. It does not follow the ID tracker state machine, I'm just trying to explain what I hear on the telechats.

The way it usually works is, Amy says, "there are X DISCUSS ballots, <insert AD's name here>, do we need to DISCUSS them today?", and the lucky AD says one of a few things:

- "no, the DISCUSSes are clear and actionable, and I agree with the concerns", or

- "yes", but the ADs talk and figure out that the point of concern is not a real concern at all, so the DISCUSSing AD clears, or

- "yes", but the ADs talk and figure out what the real issue is, and how to solve it, usually terminating in "if that happens, I'll clear my DISCUSS" (note that the sponsoring AD usually asks the DISCUSSing AD to hold the DISCUSS until it's addressed, just so the sponsoring AD doesn't misplace it - this isn't a lack of trust), or

- "yes", but the ADs talk and say the issue is real and the working group needs to make some decisions (the ADs do suggest RFC-Editor notes on calls, but this isn't common and isn't usually more than two or three lines of text), so the document goes for AD followup, or

- (and this doesn't happen often), the ADs don't work out a path forward, either before the call (ADs do talk), during the call, or after the call, and the document continues in DISCUSS status.

It would be lovely if our documents were so good, and our working groups were so good, and our ADs were so good, that there was never a DISCUSS. Until that happens, I'm OK with most of the interactions that happen on the telechat, and I suspect others would be, too.

But I'd like to focus on the documents that just hang. There are some. They aren't a large percentage of the documents that appear on each telechat agenda.

So, if we could agree on a metric (and the IESG has LOTS of metrics now), that might be helpful.

Thanks,

Spencer

p.s. The Narrative Minutes for telechats are not a deep, dark secret, and have been available at http://www.ietf.org/IESG/iesg-narrative.html for about a year. Linked from the IESG home page, one click down from the IETF home page. If you think they are useful, please say so - and then volunteer as a scribe, because Brian has been asking for more volunteers for a while now. If you think they are not useful, Brian, and his replacement, would love to know that, because both Marshall and I have things we aren't doing, because we're scribing for the IESG.

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <spencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ietf@xxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, January 06, 2007 4:43 AM
Subject: Re: IESG Success Stories


I strongly agree with John's reasoning here. But please keep reading...

From: "John C Klensin" <john-ietf@xxxxxxx>


I have two questions...

(1) Do you have evidence of actual situations in which an AD
behaved in this way, kept concerns to him or herself, and then
raised them only, and for the first time, via a DISCUSS after
Last Call?

(2) If the answer to (1) is "yes", why didn't you, and the other
people who were impacted, immediately file recall petitions?

The second question is not rhetorical.   We all understand that
recalls would be painful and destructive, that would they take
too long to have much practical impact, and so on.  However, the
behavior I think you are describing would be such an egregious
violation of the ways that the community and the IESG should be
interacting with each other that I believe a recall would be
appropriate even for someone whose term on the IESG had only a
few months remaining: it would be at least as important to
establish a clear message that the behavior is unacceptable,
ever, as it would be to get the person off the IESG.  No one is
valuable enough, hard-working enough, or smart enough that the
community should put up with the behavior I think you are
describing, even for a minute.    And that implies to me that
there should be no perception that an AD can get away with it.

     john

Now, backing off a few billion nanometers, When Michael kicked off this thread, his posting began:

So what occurs to me is that a reasonable question to ask is whether
there are some legitimate success stories where a DISCUSS has actually
found big or reasonably big problems with a protocol that would have
wreaked havoc had they not been caught. I ask because ...

My impression is that drafts that capture experience with IETF working group dynamics are painful and useful (thinking specifically of the case studies in the draft that became http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3669.txt). I think Michael's question is important enough to answer. I think I can think of some examples where the answer is "yes", but this isn't about what *I* think, it's about what our experience has been.

Do other people think that collecting DISCUSS success stories is helpful?

I have two points to add -

- Michael asked specifically about SUCCESS stories. The level of cynicism in the circles I run being sufficiently high, I'm asking about the same thing Michael is asking about, where "success" matches the dictionary definition.

- if people want to collect DISCUSS "success" stories, of the more ironic nature, I ask that we do this, going forward, and not looking backward. Depending on how you count Jon Peterson, we seated new ADs for almost half the IESG last year, and we know that we will pick up at least a few more new ADs this year, because some people have already said they will not return. We don't need to replay 30 years of history, and even going back to the beginning of ID tracker use would be less than helpful.

If you have relevant deep dirt from the recent past, please feel free to file recalls and provide NomCom input, of course. But I hope everyone already knows that.

Thanks,

Spencer


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