--On Saturday, 19 July, 2008 06:56 -0500 Spencer Dawkins <spencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >... > ... so we might just decide that this is just as bogus as > "drafts disappear > after six months", for the same reasons, and remove the block > completely, and trust WG chairs to ensure that drafts > discussed in the meetings WERE announced early enough for > participants to read them Spencer and others, I wish this would work, but we've tried it --it describes the situation we had before we had any posting limits. Back then, one could submit a document through the Friday before the meeting and then start praying that the Secretariat would get it up before, e.g., the following Thursday. But, more important, it does several things to us, all of which are bad (although to different degrees): * WG agendas may not be able to be nailed down until much too close to the meeting. Since those agendas are often used by people to make plans about which sessions to attend, rules about them being posted well in advance (even if sometimes not obeyed) help all of us. Late I-D submissions prevent those agendas from firming up unless the WG Chair takes a firm "once I post the agenda, no new documents count" position. But, where the new document is actually a revision, that creates silly states, since part of the WG will have prepared on the basis of version N and the rest will be working from version N-1. Not an impossible situation, but it makes it harder to run effective meetings. * If people come into the WG session having studied document version N-1 but the discussion occurs using a late-posted version N, they have ample grounds for appealing any conclusions, or even the fact that the discussion was held, on the grounds that their inability to prepare was discriminatory. We don't need that. * If a WG chair starts making "this one is important enough to consider despite late posting but that one isn't" decisions (which are, IMO, inevitable), it opens things up to a new range of opportunities for claims of discriminatory behavior. * We have enough trouble getting people to read drafts in advance of meetings that doing something that encourages people to sit in a WG session, reading and trying to catch up, is just unwise. If it were important enough, we could, IMO, work around all of those issues except possibly the last. But, for the overwhelming number of cases, submission cutoffs are a better idea. Now, the particular deadlines we have now were set because of Secretariat manual-handling limitations in order to guarantee documents would be posted before the meeting started and, hence, IMO, should be reviewed in the light of changed circumstances. We almost certainly do not need three weeks for new drafts. Maybe we could even manage a one-week (or a bit more) cutoff for everything. But I suggest that we should keep some cutoff to protect ourselves from worse nonsense and then, as discussed in an earlier note, make exceptions when they are obviously justified by good sense. john _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf