Hi.
I largely agree with Harald's comments, which I will not repeat.
I do, however, have a concern that he didn't mention (and might
not agree with). While I am generally in favor of the IESG's
telling the community about how it thinks about issues, there is
a fuzzy boundary between doing that and trying to create more
and more rules and mechanisms in the hope that those can be
substituted for careful judgment. There isn't quite enough
information in this statement for me to be sure how the IESG
intends to use it (that is not a complaint), but I fear it will
lie on the "more rules" rather than "better explanation" side of
the boundary.
It appears to me that it creates a new category and set of rules
about that category, but that the criteria for getting something
into that category are extremely subjective and dependent on
IESG judgment. That may be ok, but the IESG has always had the
authority to shut down WGs because they are not making progress
or have become irrelevant and has always been able to make
determinations about the proper classification of documents.
Put differently, I don't understand the problem that this
document is trying to solve. Classifying something as OBE
doesn't move us forward any better than simply identifying what
is actually going on. After reading the statement, I have no
more information about how to identify something as OBE than I
do about how to identify a WG as not working on anything anyone
cares about. The advice to avoid chartering WGs with very long
running times has been part of the culture for as long as I can
remember; it is not clear that recommendation in this document
will make any difference.
I don't seem much difference between the IESG (or an AD) saying
"this WG is not making any progress on any subject that anyone
cares about any more" and generating a statement that permits
identifying a subset of those cases with a specific label. If
there is no difference, then this document is useless but
harmless except insofar as it contributes to a growing pile of
rules. On the other hand, if the difference is that classifying
something in this way constrains the IESG's ability to apply
good sense and case-by-case analysis to what ought to be done
with partially-complete WG products, then it could easily be a
problem rather than a solution to one.
If the real problem is that the IESG has decided that ADs
cannot, in practice, shut WGs down when people still want to
work in them, no matter how irrelevant the work has become or
how little progress the WG is making, I suggest that new
"statements" and categories won't solve that problem because the
same folks who would object to the WG being shut down under
existing rules will object to its being defined as OBE so it can
be shut down.
john
--On Tuesday, February 03, 2009 15:44 +0100 Harald Alvestrand
<harald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Two concerns.
>
> 1) As the chair of a WG that many will consider to be a prime
> example of OBE, I am a bit worried about the "MUST NOT
> publish" statements.
>
> A traditional antidote to long-running WGs has been to kill
> them and tell the editors "if you really want to finish up,
> you can always do individual submission" - and individual
>...
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