--On Monday, 15 January, 2007 09:26 -0800 Dave Crocker
<dhc2@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> In the current model, any follow-on discussion really is
> between the Design Team and Chairs, with the AD. This
> introduces the possibility of significant late-stage changes
> that are agreed to by a smaller set than the whole working
> group. Even for items that are then returned to the wg, the
> wg cannot see the basis for the proposed changes; worse,
> having this all be late-stage, along with the added delay
> during the effort to resolve the Discuss, stands a good chance
> of resulting in less careful inspection by wg members
> interested in expediting closure.
Dave,
FWIW, I am, and have always been, much more concerned with this
particular problem of having post-Last Call issue resolution
turn into a private negotiation among a small number of actors,
with the WG essentially uninvolved and unaware, as the most
serious late-stage threat to quality of our output. The rest of
the issues about DISCUSS generation and tracking are, indeed,
troublesome. But I believe that, in the vast majority of cases,
they eventually get sorted out, even though they may waste time
and otherwise not be efficient. I don't want to minimize the
impact of that loss of time, but the private negotiations are,
IMO, what put us at risk of producing documents that really do
not represent IETF consensus (or, in the worst cases, even WG
consensus).
I also wonder, as we fine-tune notification to WGs about Last
Call comments, what we should be doing about documents that are
individually submitted to the IESG (or generated by the IESG)
for publication (on the Standards Track or otherwise).
The question is complicated by the observation that many WGs
have multiple work items. Someone with particular expertise
that overlaps one or two of them might want to track relevant
Last Calls closely, but would be unlikely to subscribe to the WG
list to do so.
Perhaps we should make it a requirement that any document that
is Last Called must be associated with a mailing list, perhaps
one whose duration is limited to the Last Call period and any
follow-ups until the document is either published or finally
rejected. If there were a WG, then the WG list should be a
proper subset of that list, anyone commenting during the Last
Call should be added to it, and others could be added on request.
That is just a quick idea and is probably not the right one, but
I am concerned that we are in danger of optimizing for one case
--the WG with either a single task item or a set of _very_
closely related ones-- and accidentally pessimizing the other
cases.
john
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