On Jun 26, 2011, at 12:42 AM, Murray S. Kucherawy wrote: >> I rather hope not. As someone else has argued in this thread, WGs >> tend to be narrowly focussed. The IETF LC is at least partly, as I >> understand it, to make sure that something which seems an obviously >> good idea to the WG doesn't have all manner of implications that the >> WG perhaps did not consider. > > Maybe I'm taking your words too extremely, but if WGs tend to be narrowly focused, then how can they be reasonably assured of the success of anything they produce? I'm imagining a model here wherein a WG produces documents suffering from a focus that is too narrow, those documents go to IETF LC or the IESG, and are invariably shot down because they failed to account for this or that outside of that focus. It would take a huge number of iterations to get anything done. Quite often it really doesn't matter that a WG is narrowly focused. Consider IP-over-foo documents, for example. Most of the rest of the community doesn't care, or need to care, how a particular IP-over-foo mechanism is defined. IP has been around so long that people generally understand what any given IP-over-foo mechanism needs to accomplish. Even where some difficult compromise is needed, the community can generally trust the Internet area to make reasonable decisions. But cross-area concerns in IETF have often been handled poorly. The way IETF is structured, it takes careful crafting of a charter and close management by a politically skilled and conscientious AD, to get a working group whose output is going to affect a wide range of concerns, to produce documents that really earn community-wide consensus. This has to be balanced against a very real concern that trying to put too many different kinds of people in the same room, so to speak, might result in a group that can't agree on anything. (When I was an AD my goal was always to get a broad spectrum of interests in the room, but I remember one occasion where the group failed miserably because the various factions were completely unwilling to compromise on how to solve a problem....in this case because two out of the three factions saw an opportunity for a land grab and weren't about to give it up that easily.) Without pointing fingers, I think it's fair to say that the results of WGs producing documents that really had broad consensus of the community, have been mixed. Some WGs and ADs have done better jobs than others. Note that these are effects of scale. I remember it being easier to look for, and to get consensus on, such issues when active participation in IETF was only a few hundred people. It was certainly easier to track what was going on in IETF when there were fewer working groups. Also, in the distant past there were plenary meetings where each area would give a summary of activity in that area for the benefit of all of the participants. Those meetings tended to drag a bit, and take time away from WG sessions, so I don't think they were missed very much. But it might be that a stripped down version of such meetings - focusing on issues that might affect multiple areas of concern - would benefit the community, and be more important than WG sessions. (I tend to think that IETF has too many WGs these days, but of course that just reflects the incredible breadth of the Internet today.) > Rather, I would hope they would have or seek to have enough people in them to bring breadth as well as depth, specifically so that they aren't producing things prone to raise objections. Perhaps we see this as the role of the AD that is overseeing that particular WG, but that seems a huge burden to put on one person. It is. > For the working groups and documents into which I've put work, I've made a point of seeking the breadth so that the reviews of the various directorates, whose comments are influential with the IESG, don't end up stalling publication. I would hope this is common practice. It's a good idea, and I suspect it's often sufficient, but not always. >> It seems to me that very strong reaction in the IETF generally to a >> proposal demands convincing counter-arguments from those who support >> the publication. I refuse to have an opinion about the example under >> discussion, but surely we don't want to build in some preference for >> what the WG says. > > I suspect the documents from a WG should carry within them enough instructive text to include those arguments up-front, so if there's any objection voiced at IETF LC, it's bound to be new material. The re-hashing of the same arguments made in the WG during IETF LC seems like a waste of time to me unless there are new details available. Sometimes it does help if the WG explains why it made particular decisions; that can help to reduce re-hashing of those same issues during IETF LC. That doesn't by itself counter the effect of WG bias in favor of some concerns and against others, though it might make such biases more obvious both to the WG and to the community at large. In general, I think WGs need to be more aware that their job is to produce a document that will earn consensus of the whole community. Keith _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf