Re: Guidelines for authors and reviewers

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At 3:04 PM -0700 5/29/08, Suresh Krishnan wrote:
>Hi Folks,
>   We have written a draft describing some guidelines for authors and
>reviewers of internet drafts. We would really appreciate it if you can
>spend some time to go over it and provide comments and/or suggestions
>for improvement.
>
>Thanks
>Suresh, Pasi and Eric

Hi Suresh, Pasi, Eric,

	I looked at it, and, while I laud any efforts to get folks to review
things effectively, I have to say that I found this to be a pretty drafty draft.
It does not reference the Tao, 2026, or any of the developed educational materials;
its only listed reference, in fact, is 2119 and that does not seem to be referenced
within the text.  That means that this comes across as pretty context free.
It needs anchoring to the rest of our processes.
	One of the things that I believe that anchoring should provide
is a pretty significant change of perspective.  As this reads now,
it implies a lot of power in the hands of reviews to elicit (or even require)
change.   It seems to want document authors to accede to requests for
tutorial material as a matter of course and to significant technical changes
with a modicum of fuss.  That's not the right approach.  The outcome of our
document development should not be a negotiation between the authors
and the assigned reviewers.  It should be a conversation in the working group
among those who will actually develop the implementations, those who
will deploy it, and those who are affected by the system of which the
documented technology  is a part. 
	Reviews that work to relate a particular document's technology
to the larger whole of which it is a part (asking: how does this impact
congestion control in the access network or core, use deployed security systems,
relate to the identifier mechanisms common to URIs, etc.) are very valuable.
But many reviews represent questions about decisions that come down to
design choices that working groups should have the power to make without
extensive second-guessing.  Folks who want to have a say at the level can and
should do so with the simple method of joining the working group list and commenting
as part of the general development.  That's not "review" (of someone else's work)
it is "participation" (in joint work), and it is fundamentally more valuable.
Without the context of how "participation" works, your documents description
of "review" comes off very badly indeed.  I hope that future versions can correct
that and place review within a broader, more productive context.
			good luck,
				Ted

 








>-------- Original Message --------
>Subject: I-D Action:draft-krishnan-review-process-00.txt
>Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 11:15:01 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Internet-Drafts@xxxxxxxx
>Reply-To: internet-drafts@xxxxxxxx
>To: i-d-announce@xxxxxxxx
>
>A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts
>directories.
>
>        Title           : Guidelines to authors and reviewers regarding the
>IETF review process
>        Author(s)       : S. Krishnan, et al.
>        Filename        : draft-krishnan-review-process-00.txt
>        Pages           : 10
>        Date            : 2008-05-28
>
>This document describes the IETF review process and provides
>guidelines to draft authors and reviewers on how to effectively
>participate in it.
>
>A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
>http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-krishnan-review-process-00.txt
>
>Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP at:
>ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/
>
>Below is the data which will enable a MIME compliant mail reader
>implementation to automatically retrieve the ASCII version of the
>Internet-Draft.
>
>_______________________________________________
>IETF mailing list
>IETF@xxxxxxxx
>https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

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