Re: Last Call: <draft-arkko-iesg-crossarea-02.txt> (Experiences from Cross-Area Work at the IETF) to Informational RFC

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At 15:49 06-02-2013, The IESG wrote:
The IESG has received a request from an individual submitter to consider
the following document:
- 'Experiences from Cross-Area Work at the IETF'
  <draft-arkko-iesg-crossarea-02.txt> as Informational RFC

The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits
final comments on this action. Please send substantive comments to the
ietf@xxxxxxxx mailing lists by 2013-03-06. Exceptionally, comments may be

I read draft-arkko-iesg-crossarea-03 as I am trying to learn about the IETF. In Section 2:

   "This work has been going on in the TRILL WG on the Internet Area
    and in parallel in the ISIS WG on the Routing Area."

There is an assumption that I know what "WG" means.

Editorial: I suggest within the area instead of on the area.

In Section 3:

  "Cross-area work is needed, of course, in any situation where a
   particular technical problem does not cleanly map to one
   organization."

Shouldn't that map to a working group?

In Section 4:

  "But it is also possible that concerns raised in one forum are
   not understood in another, and this can lead to an effort going
   forward after finding the "lowest bar" forum to take it up."

Brian Carpenter commented about Area Shopping in his Gen-ART review. Scrolling back to Section 3, "from an IETF participant's point of view, it is important that there is a working group where the technical topic that he or she is interested in can be discussed. The problem is how to identify that working group. I went to http://datatracker.ietf.org/list/wg/ to find the working group where I can discuss about my solution to an IPv6 problem. I found "IPv6 Maintenance". I am not sure what that group does. As the problem affects IPv6 operations I picked the "IPv6 Operations" working group. I post a message to the mailing list. There isn't any reply. My solution does some DNS stuff. I try the "Domain Name System Operations" working group. I keep trying various mailing lists until I find the "right" venue.

The actual problem is finding out what's the main topic of the draft within an IETF context and identifying the proper working group. There should also be someone to identify related topics which will be useful as input for the draft to progress. The IESG part of the "process" is more about identifying which working groups should be chartered and in which area they should fall. The Area Shopping heading looks at the problem from an IESG perspective. The "lowest bar" is the IETF participant's perspective.

  "A more common issue is that the different organizations typically
   have different motivations."

The Abstract mentions "challenges for the organization of the IETF". Although I think I understand what "Problem Ownership" is about, I suspect that the reader might be confused about what the two paragraphs discuss about.

  "For the regular participant it is difficult to find out where there
   are important documents that would deserve more review."

It's not a matter of important documents. I would say that it is about the regular participant being able to find that document which he/she believes is important or the subject of discussion where his/her input would be helpful.

Recommendation 8 is about interaction between working groups. It would be good if WG Chairs could reach out to other working groups when a topic relates to what's in their charter. Recommendation 9 looks at conflicts from an area point of view. The current scheduling model is based on groups the participants would like to attend instead of conflicts which may prevent the topics being discussed from the cross-area participants. Recommendation 10 comes out as having 10 in the list. :-)

It took me some time to understand that the draft was about how work is organized in the IETF. I didn't really understand what area means except that Routing Area must have something to do with router and Security Area must have something to do with security. I decided to read the Informational reference and I learned that it is a management division within the IETF.

I suggest having some text in Section 1 to introduce the areas. The Abstract should be aligned with the Introduction Section. Section 2 provides examples of cross-area work. There aren't any examples to illustrate the challenges except for the AD scheduling conflict.

Regards,
-sm


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