> Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> In principle I would be against charging, but my experience of being a > >> chair makes me believe that many authors have no reason to publish > >> their I-D which are just a burden to the I-D secretariat and thus the > >> entire IETF community. > >that's a really amazing statement. If I were participating in a WG > >whose chair had that attitude, I'd be lobbying hard with the IESG for > >another chair, as I'd suspect that the incumbent chair was > >inappropriately hostile to introduction of new ideas within the WG. > Sorry, what "attitude" are you talking about here ? I was speaking > about people who publish drafts but never say a word to anyone about > their draft. Please explain how it is you can be sure they haven't communicated to anyone about their draft. > What's the purpose ? People are, as a rule, lazy. It is therefore pretty unlikely that they will engage in a fairly time-consuming activity with no purpose in mind. A better question is whether or not the purpose for which some drafts are published is in line with the general goals of the IETF, and if it isn't should something be done about it. For example, I suspect that in some cases drafts are published primarily for the authors to be able say that they have done work in the IETF. So let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that (a) The cost of publishing an I-D is significant, (b) Lots of drafts are published that aren't intended to fulfill the goals of the IETF. Given these assumptions the obvious fix is to reduce publication costs with better automation. I find it extremely hard to believe that our publication needs cannot be met with an almost entirely automated system, one where the per-draft costs are extremely low. We might have to sacrifice a little to make it work, but given that we're a bunch of engineers here and engineering is always about tradeoffs I see no reason why we should be unwilling or unable to apply engineering principles to our internal processes. For example, if extraction of drafts from email cannot be automated I think we all could survive with a web-based submission tool. But even if we cannot get the costs down I don't think charging for being able to post a draft solves the problem. Rather, the likely outcomes is that people will simply stop posting drafts to a central server. They will instead post their drafts to their own servers and send a message to one or more IETF lists saying they have done so. So this won't work unless we accompany the charge with a hard rule that only drafts posted to the authorized IETF server can be discussed on IETF lists, and at that point I suspect we'd have a full scale revolt on our hands. (To be perfectly honest I'd likely be one of the people leading the revolt.) > If the purpose is to get new ideas > through, I don't see how publishing a draft and non advertising is > useful for the sender (it may for the reader). But more importantly, I > don't see what you see as "hostile" in the observation above. Your saying that your experience as a working group chair is what led you to this conclusion is what made it hostile - very hostile indeed IMO. It would have read very differently had you instead made the comment speaking as a general IETF participant. But given the context Keith's characterization sounded spot on to me. Ned _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf