Keith, thank you for the feedback. Some responses inline:
1. Fix the broken IESG voting system before you try to establish more decision criteria.
I do agree with your general thinking here. The way that you describe the different positions is what I personally try to achieve in my IESG reviews. But I think you are overemphasizing the role of the vote designations. Again, I try to do this already, though maybe not always succeeding. In general, if the Area Directors are not doing their job of stopping bad stuff and moving good stuff along, they don't need a new voting system, they need to grow a spine. Elaborating a bit more about this: We have plenty of cases where a DISCUSS has been left standing, and today that acts as your "NO" vote. (Obviously, in many cases this was an error, or lack of effort. I'm quilty of this for sure, even right now I have a queue of DISCUSSes and their proposed resolutions that I need to go check.) But I think a DISCUSS should stand, if there is a serious issue and it is not rectified. There are corner cases where a single AD has an opinion that is not shared by the rest of the community. For those cases we have an override procedure. This has been never been invoked, but that's probably because it gets pretty ugly way before that -- there are often heated discussions between ADs about discusses. We have the ABSTAIN vote, which some ADs use to vote "NO", often together with other ADs who feel the same. There's never been a case where this would have blocked a document from proceeding, as we've never collected the necessary 1/3 number of ADs to vote ABSTAIN for any single document. My conclusion is that ABSTAIN stands for NO-OBJECTION in practical terms. I don't recommend its use...
2. Don't overconstrain the use of DISCUSS. In particular, don't ever create a situation where a reviewer can't cite a problem with a document, regardless of whether that problem has previously been enumerated.
I agree, and that's why the guidelines I posted are just that -- guidelines. They are not binding rules, they leave room for a judgment call.
3. I take serious issue with the statement in the draft that IESG reviews are "reviews of last resort" and the implication that WG reviews are sufficient. In numerous situations this has not been the case.
Of course. But I don't see a conflict between a "review of last resort" and having the last resort find issues. I wish we'd find less issues, but at least I still view the IESG as the final check, that should catch issues if others have not. Its not a "last resort" in the sense that it would not be invoked; we do review all documents very carefully. Its a last resort only in the sense that there is an expectation that previous stages should have produced a quality result without issues. Jari _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf