As often, Spencer speaks sense.
By the way, would it be possible for all DISCUSSes and COMMENTs for I-Ds
originated by a working group to be *automatically* copied to the mailing
list of the working group? The reasons are:
- the WG chairs, editors, and interested parties should
not have to monitor the I-D tracker to spot them
- there is otherwise no automatic archiving of the
follow-up discussions
- it can often be hard to tell from the record
how/if/why a DISCUSS was cleared (the entries in
the I-D tracker do not usually show this information)
- the WG has an obvious interest in the follow-up
discussions
- if the discussions result in changes to the I-D the
WG really needs to be kept in the loop
Not sure who should own this, but typically ADs have told me that it is "not
necessary". (The I-D tracker has a Web page for making suggestions, so I
have pasted this email there.)
Cheers,
Adrian
----- Original Message -----
From: "Spencer Dawkins" <spencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ietf@xxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, January 05, 2007 10:09 PM
Subject: When is a DISCUSS really a discussion?
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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