Hi, John and Jari,
Either suggestion you guys made would be a step in the right direction.
And just to be clear, I have no intention of touching the
increasing-WG-charter-formality tarbaby (US reference, details at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarbaby) - "how many bar BoFs do I have to have
before I can request a BoF?" being a spectacular example of this genre.
My only desire is to provide better certainty that (for example) when Robert
asks me if I'm OK with "the proposed SIP-CLF charter", we both have the same
understanding of what that means.
Thanks,
Spencer
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
_______________________________________________
Ietf@xxxxxxxx
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf