Commenting on one issue from John's email from Sat 10/30/2010 4:18am (and ignoring the issue of what John was doing up at 4am): > However, a change to the handling of documents that are > candidates for Proposed Standard is ultimately in the hands of > the IESG. In principle, they could announce tomorrow that any > document submitted for processing after IETF 79 would be > evaluated against the criteria in 2026 and no others other than > reasonable document clarity. If the IESG has the will --and > whatever community backing is needed-- to do that, then the > "two-step" document is not needed. ... I don't quite agree with this. I think that if the IESG wanted to step back to a "closer to the wording of 2026" process for proposed standard documents, then we *do* need to also move to a two step process (rather than a three step process). The reason is that moving from proposed standard to draft standard is a step that isn't worth the trouble. This means that most RFCs can't ever get to full standard. If we want the first step to really *only be the first step*, we need a second step that will actually be worth enough that someone will take the effort to follow it for the vast majority of useful standards. I won't claim that the two-step document is actually going to cause the IESG to make the first step easier. However, the IESG has noticed the message from the community that we don't want many silly discuss votes to drag out document approval unnecessarily, and has done some serious navel gazing on the subject. To me it appears that there has been some improvement in this area over the past five or six years (and I can recall some rather frustrating examples five or six years ago that I would rather not dissect in public -- or anywhere else without a beer in front of me). Ross _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf