On Aug 30, 2011, at 5:51 PM, Fred Baker wrote: On Aug 30, 2011, at 2:17 PM, Keith Moore wrote: My understanding was always that DISCUSS was supposed to be an indication that, at a minimum, the AD needs to understand the situation better before casting a yea or nay vote. The resolution of a DISCUSS might end up being a yes vote, a no objection vote, a request for clarification of the document. It should also be possible for an AD to say "now that I've understood better, I can't support this going forward" (for which ABSTAIN is not an appropriate label).
It should never be wrong for an AD to vote DISCUSS, though it's reasonable to limit the amount of time during which a DISCUSS can stand for a particular document.
It should also never be wrong for an AD to vote NO if the AD has initially voted DISCUSS, made a sincere effort to understand the issues, believes that he does so, and can state 2026 or other documented criteria for why the document is not suitable for approval.
I agree in part. My problem is that even some ADs tell me that ADs sometimes behave as if they haven't done their job if they haven't produced a "discuss". A few months ago, I got a "discuss" on a document that in essence said "what should I be writing a 'discuss' about?". I have no problem with valid concerns, and many of the concerns raised are valid. It should be possible for a working group to produce a quality document and have the IESG simply approve it, however. I'm not sure it is.
The first time I reviewed a document as an AD, I realized I was working very hard to find something wrong. And I did - I found a bona fide (and uncontroversial) technical flaw - actually an incorrect value for a constant. But after that I got over needing to find things that were wrong. I found plenty of issues without trying to do anything more than read and understand the documents - and had quite enough work to do just reading and understanding them and writing up those issues without making more work for myself. (Especially when other ADs would often demand that I not only identify the issues but also specify the fixes - something I always regarded as out-of-scope for an AD and even potentially "tampering" with WG output.)
So I don't disagree that ADs sometime believe that they need to vote Discuss or they're not doing their jobs. Though I have a hard time believing that the drafts coming out of WGs these days are so good that ADs have to work hard to find things that are wrong with many of them. If they're trying to find a reason to Discuss every document, well I guess that is a problem. But overall, it seems like there are far more incentives to avoid finding reasons to object to a document, than there are to find them.
Discuss votes should time out and be replaced by Abstain (if not explicitly changed by the AD) after say 45 days.
There I disagree. If the AD raised a valid issue, the ball is in the author/wg's court to address it. They can game this rule by not responding until after 45 days.
I don't think I stated that rule very well. If the author/wg fail to address the issue within 45 days, the AD should of course be able to change the vote to No. The point is that the Discuss should inherently be a temporary state, a time during which the AD doesn't vote No (yet) but lets the author/WG know that he has issues with a document. And the idea is to encourage those parties enough time to understand each other and work out their differences before bringing the issue to a firm vote. But I don't think that the WG should be able to game the rule to force the AD's objection to go away, nor should the AD be able to singlehandedly block a document. Personally, I would rather see the document returned to the author/wg if review results in a request for major changes. In my working group, we recently had one draft completely rewritten in the response to "discuss"es, and I pulled it back for the WG to decide whether it still had consensus around the resulting draft. I would say the same about a "discuss" that is not adequately responded to in 45 days; the IESG should clean it off their plate.
IMO, any time a document is significantly revised, IESG should consider it a separate item, requiring a new Last Call, writeup, ballot, etc. What's also not fair game is to "raise the bar" - to expect the document at DS to meet more stringent criteria than it was required to meet at the time of PS approval.
Hmmm, the "demonstrated interoperability" requirement of DS/IS is in fact a raising of the bar,and one that has served us well. We don't (although IMHO we should) require even an implementation to go to PS.
I should have been more specific. By "raising the bar" I was thinking about things like design decisions, and document quality. If feature FOO was judged to be of adequate design at PS, it's not fair to say it's not adequate on DS review unless there's some new information that demonstrates that it doesn't work well. Or if the wording of a document was okay with IESG at PS, it's not fair for an AD to nitpick that wording at DS review time unless there's some reason to believe that the wording caused problems. For those cases the AD can always file an erratum.
Keith
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