Re: article on innovation and open standards

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On 05/15/2013 02:42 AM, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
On Wed, 15 May 2013, Keith Moore wrote:

Yes, I'm aware that some people (including myself) have effectively participated on occasion without doing either of the above. But I think it's hard to effectively participate in IETF on a regular basis without a significant investment in both time and money.

Personally I've only been on a single physical IETF meeting. I participate mainly via mailing lists.

And yes, it's hard to participate without spending (significant) time. I don't know how else this could be done though. It's at least my opinion that if time is made available, the barrier of entry is probably the lowest of any similar organisation I can think of.

I'd like to see WGs be more pro-active about periodically summarizing the salient points of their proposals, determining which parties outside of the WG are likely to be affected, explicitly soliciting input from those parties, and explicitly considering that input in their deliberations. Some WGs do this, but for most WGs I don't think it happens often enough or formally/transparently enough.

Last Call shouldn't be the first time that we explicitly solicit feedback on proposals from interested parties outside the WG.

As far as I can tell, the primary reason that WGs are so resistant to IESG feedback is that too often the WGs have labored long and hard with little or no feedback from external sources, and they've reached consensus mostly by exhaustion. By the time a document gets to IESG review and community-wide Last Call, the WG is usually too exhausted and/or too committed to that particular solution to fix any major flaws. At this point there are often no good solutions - simple text changes and IESG notes are usually inadequate, and publishing the document in its current form may do more harm than good. But if WGs got feedback from outside parties much earlier in the process, there's a much better chance that such problems could be fixed before the WG were exhausted and committed.

Of course anyone can send input to a WG's mailing list at any time. But someone who doesn't regularly follow the mailing list can have a difficult time understanding the state of things and knowing how and when to provide useful input.

Keith





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