It is essential that we can easily show differences and explain the
rationale behind a particular change. Right now the public charter
review process rarely does that. For contrast, when I recharter a
working group I usually send a message to IESG, IAB, and few of our
directorates. The message contains:
- explanation of what has happened in the real world or IETF to justify
a change
- the new charter text
- a diff (I simply run rfcdiff on the old and new texts and attach a
.html file, or put it on my website)
But what goes out on the public call for review is a stripped down
version: just the new charter text. I agree that its very hard to parse
from the end result what the rationale or the difference was. This is
made even harder by some formatting and HTML issues that one would
typically encounter when trying to look at the IETF web charter and
another version in an e-mail. I think an improvement here would be
useful. I think there's been a few times when I have posted a separate
e-mail explaining the rationale and changes, as a reply to the
ietf-announce mail. But I certainly have not done it for every WG. Maybe
I should have.
However, speaking personally, for some reason I'm not too enthusiastic
about writing charters in drafts. Perhaps this is just resistance to a
change, but I have found it personally easy to deal with the charters
simply as text. Writing charters as drafts would in my opinion
complicate the process. I couldn't write a proposed charter version NN
for a BOF in the two weeks before an IETF meeting. And often the
different versions are written by different people, e.g., original
proponents, then selected BOF chairs, then ADs. Some of these people
would probably take it longer to set up the necessary tools and submit
the draft than it would take from them to send an e-mail with text. And
not all versions of charter proposals represent actually agreed
charters. Typically even a simple recharter event would go through 2-3
iterations.
But I do have an alternate proposal, if its important for the IETF
community to understand the differences and rationales of charter
changes better. Why don't we simply change the announcement format to
include the three parts that I outlined above? My understanding is that
the process is largely manual from the secretariat's point of view, so
all it would take is for the AD to include three pieces of information
instead of one when requesting a charter review to be sent out. In most
cases this information exists already, its just a matter of sending it
out to the public as well as the IESG.
Jari
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