Inline .... On Jan 18, 2008, at 10:56 AM, John C Klensin wrote: > Hi. > > The current cutoff schedule for Internet Drafts dates from my > time on the IESG (i.e., is ancient history). It was conditioned > on the pre-IETF rush and the observation that the Secretariat, > at the time, required a sufficiently long time to get drafts > posted in the pre-meeting rush that, unless there was a two-week > cutoff, we couldn't reliably have all expected documents in hand > prior to the start of the meetings. > > Splitting the "new" and "revised" drafts was a further attempt > to compensate when the load built up enough that the choices > were between such a split and moving the submission deadline for > _all_ I-Ds back even further. The conclusion was that a split > was desirable because a three-week cutoff for revisions would > seriously interfere with WGs getting work done in the run-up to > IETF meetings. > > With the automated posting tools typically getting I-Ds posted > in well under an hour and a tiny fraction of the documents being > handled manually, the original reasons for the submission > cutoffs no longer apply. It is still reasonable, IMO, to have a > cutoff early enough to permit people to receive and read > documents before departing for the meetings, but it seems to me > that criterion would require a cutoff a week (or even less) > prior to the meeting, not two or three weeks. Other models > about giving people time to read might suggest leaving the "new > document" cutoff at three weeks before the meeting, but seeing > if we could move the "revision" cutoff considerably closer to > the meetings. Makes sense - also the IESG agree to something along lines of moving the deadline for drafts that are moving from individual to 00 WG drafts to be the same as deadline for non 00 drafts but I don't know that has been implemented yet or not. > > > I don't necessarily object to retaining the current two and > three week posting deadlines, but I'd like to know that the IESG > has done a careful review of those deadlines and their > applicability to the current environment and concluded that they > are still appropriate, rather than having the secretariat retain > them simply on tradition and autopilot. I don't think the IESG has done a review of these times - and I agree the new tools certainly change some of the reasons that caused the old times to be chosen. At least one of the reason they IESG has not looked at them is just the IESG is working on other things. As a result, the status quo ends up being the default decision. Speaking only as an individual contributor here, I 100% agree with you that we want these times to be as short as possible yet still leave enough time that people have a reasonable chance to read the material before the meetings so we don't have to run tutorials in the valuable WG meeting time. It may be that the right time is actually different for some WG or areas though that would be complicated to have in practice. Often the time right before an IETF meeting lands on a major holiday further reducing the time and we have travel time so I think theses needs to be taken into to account when thinking about how much time is needed. For the past several meetings I have tried to read or at least skim all the documents that are the agenda of any RAI WG meeting. I would expect that most ADs would be reading at least all the documents in the WG they were the responsible AD for. Looking at the authors and key contributors of WG documents in RAI, I see that there are many that are very active in over 2/3 of the RAI WG + Behave. When I look at the number of WGs that some of the IAB members participate it in, it is also very large. I can send you my reading lists for IETF 68 and 70 and it is a bit hard to count "real pages" that don't include all the boiler plate stuff. For ietf 68, which was a very heavy reading list for me, it had about 250 drafts with a "wc -w" word count of a bit under 2 million words. While IETF 70 which was very light had around 120 drafts with a word count of around to 0.9 million words. A large percentage of these were revisions of drafts I had previously read which greatly speeds things up - clearly no one is going to read this many drafts where it is the first time to looked at them. At ietf 68, about 70 of the drafts out of the 250 were 00 drafts but some of those were just renames so hard to count without a more detailed look. Some drafts I can read in 15 minutes if I am not sending any comments and they are short and familiar. A complicated draft where I might have to go and reread some other background draft or RFC and I send significant comments will take four hours. Now I have the luxury of being able to use most of my time to read drafts right before an IETF but I think the time also needs to work for people who participate in several WGs and are reading during their "own time" vs. their "employers time". If you asked me today if I would make the time longer or shorter, I have no idea which I would say. I do think that looking at various groups of participants, who much they need to read, and how much time they have to do it, is the right way to figure this out. Cullen <with my individual contributor hat on> > > > thanks, > john > > > _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx http://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf