Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > The biggest problem with the current voting system (other than > misleading labels, which do cause real problems of their own) is the > presumption that the document should go forward no matter how few > IESG members read the document. Keith makes a good point here; but I wouldn't agree to any rule that a particular number must "read" a document. Some ADs quite properly defer actual reading to review teams. > So No Objection votes from ADs who didn't read the document count as > Yes votes, No, they don't. (But I can't ask folks posting to this thread to actually _understand_ the difference.) Roughly, the rule says "enough" ADs must enter a "position" before a document can be approved. Basically, "No-Objection" says the AD is "somewhat" familiar with the document and actively consents to approving it. These "positions" are _NOT_ "votes". > but there's also a presumption in the rules (as well as pressure from > other ADs who want to get documents off the agenda) to clear Discuss > votes in favor of moving a document forward whether or not the > identified issues have been adequately addressed. This is somewhat true, but the "pressure" is highly variable. The agendas _are_ too crowded (IMHO); but in most cases sufficient progress will have been made before the telechat that only a few seconds are needed to agree to "AD-followup" status. When there is no progress between telechats (most often due to unresponsive authors/editors), there _is_ some pressure to reduce what a DISCUSS asks for. It might help for non-IESG folk to chime in on whether this is good or bad... (There _are_ cases where the responsible AD puts quite a bit of pressure on the DISCUSS-holder: that's really an internal issue which I don't believe this list should be discussing.) > (One thing that I didn't mention that also needs to be fixed if > it's still the case is the presumption that the responsible AD > votes Yes for the document. I don't know what the tools do now, > but this Yes vote used to be automatically filled-in.) We're seeing a number of cases where the responsible AD holds a DISCUSS at the time of the telechat -- generally because LastCall hadn't ended yet when the document was placed on the agenda. IMHO, there's nothing there that needs "fixing". > Arguably when a poor quality document gets to IESG, it's a failure > on the part of the WG to do due diligence. IMHO, there _are_ poor-quality documents that get on the IESG agenda. I'm not sure it helps to allocate blame... But there is a huge variance between WGs on diligence. I am alarmed by the sheer number of COMMENTS saying in essence, "This document is not specific enough to guide an implementor to an interoperable implementation." To me, that's really-close to DISCUSS territory... However, we really don't have a process for improving situations like that -- other than for it to be a DISCUSS and for authors to actually be responsive (which would probably require repeating at least one LastCall). :^( In the absence of such a process, I really can't blame ADs for reducing such issues from DISCUSS to COMMENT, and entering ABSTAIN if they think the issue is serious. > But the problem is actually deeper than that - it's partially > structural (in that IETF partitions almost all work into narrowly > focused WGs who don't represent a sufficiently broad spectrum of > interests), and partially due to a failure to consistently apply > good engineering principles across all of IETF. +1 This problem, of course, is endemic in organizations that depend on volunteers. And I really don't have suggestions on how to ensure sufficient wide-area review, though review teams certainly help. I wonder if there's some room for process-improvement by formalizing some role for review teams... > IESG's assuming that the WG has produced a quality result basically > works to mask the other problems with IETF's way of doing work. I don't agree that's what IESG members "assume" -- they IMHO instead presume that documenting ideas (even not-fully-baked ideas) is a mostly-unmitigated good-thing. > But even if WGs generally did produce high quality results without > issues (which I don't think is the case now), IESG review should > still not presume that they do. There will always be some failures > at the WG level, and the IESG's job is to try to catch those. I don't think we have universal agreement on that as a goal. Of course, neither do we have universal agreement that anyone else has the job to "catch these". Some of us quite plainly believe it shouldn't be anyone's job to "catch these": that ideas should be published and we should see whether "rough consensus" emerges later. (All of which brings us to the actual question: when advancing a maturity-level, what constitutes sufficient "consensus"? Arguably, folks will expect a higher maturity level to indicate that the "standard" is ready to be handed to an implementor, and merely by following it, sufficient interoperability is ensured. Alas, we really don't have a process to address that expectation...) -- John Leslie <john@xxxxxxx> _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf