--On Tuesday, February 03, 2009 11:40 -0600 Spencer Dawkins <spencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Speaking as someone who usually doesn't know what the IESG is > thinking ... ;-) >... Spencer, Since you addressed part of your comments to me, let me try a specific answer: (1) Anything that clearly shifts this document toward "guidance to the community about how the IESG is thinking about things" and away from "more rules" will make me proportionally happier. Certainly eliminating the 2119 language would help in that regard. (2) The reason I asked the question about what the problem was being solved is that I don't believe we have an OBE specification problem. I believe we have a problem that derives from an apparently growing reluctance on the part of the IESG to shut down disfunctional and non-productive WGs and WGs that are just not worth the resources they consume. The OBE situation is just a special case of that more general problem. I imagine that the reluctance is caused by the IESG not believing it has community support for such shutdowns. More specifically, while much of the community favors them in the abstract, shutting down a WG will almost always upset those who have invested work in it and, in today's IETF, they will be a lot louder than those who will applaud the action. If that is, in fact, the problem, then I don't think posting this document as a special case will solve it. At the same time, if the IESG has decided that, even if they can't or won't solve the disfunctional WG problem generally, they are willing to take a stand about the OBE case, I'm in favor of it. (3) Finally, reprising many comments and specific suggestions over the years, I believe "under what circumstances should we shut this WG down?" is the wrong question. Instead, we should be devising criteria, interpreting benchmarks, and possibly using IESG turnover as triggers for review of WGs, reviews that start from the assumption that, beyond a certain point, a WG needs to justify its continued existence rather than requiring an AD to justify calling it off. I don't know if it is still possible to do that in the IETF, but I note that ISO (including ISO/IEC JTC1) learned the value of shutting down projects how to do that, in part, from us and created more specific sunset and timeout procedures around it than we ever had... and that, during the same period, we forgot how to shut WGs down when they were not performing. john _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf