I your blog, you wrote: > Having been involved in the process for many years, often the bigger changes at this stage relate to cross-area issues, or the fact that the careful reviews from the IETF last call, directorates, and 15 ADs often represents a significant increase in the number of non-WG people looking at the document. If I may make a suggestion, I suspect that the problem statement suggests its own solution: get cross-area reviewers involved in the working group process earlier. There is a trade-off in that, of course, which is that if the cross-area review happens too early it may happen on a document that isn't really ready for cross-area review. But bottom line, that's what you need to have. As a working group chair, what I have done on a number of occasions is ask one directorate or another (usually the security directorate, which is not to pick on them but to be frank) to review a document that I think has need of their expertise. This has not, in my history, been fruitful; I have gotten a few responses, but not many. If there were a way to request those that would in fact result in reviews, I would include it in my standard WGLC process, and I suspect that would have a salubrious effect. The other thing that I might suggest is a comment I have made before: if in the opinion of the IESG a document needs a lot of work (e.g., non-trivial changes), return it to the working group. I know of, due to some spam I received a few months ago, an editorial service in London that will for a small fee (a common IETF document would be perhaps 100 pounds) review and update a document; pointing the option out to a working group chair might be as useful a response as any. Corporate technical writing services might also be called in. Whatever the technical issues a document has, the place for them to *not* be worked out is with an AD simply holding the document hostage; it is to say it needs work and send it back for the work. Both of those would be likely to simplify the life of an AD as well.