Re: Is this an elephant? [Was: call for ideas: tail-heavy IETF process]

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On 05/17/2013 05:31 AM, Yoav Nir wrote:
On May 17, 2013, at 12:58 AM, Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 05/16/2013 04:46 PM, Yoav Nir wrote:
The time for asking whether the group has considered making this field fixed length instead of variable, or whether RFC 2119 language is used in an appropriate way, or whether the protocol is extensible enough is at IETF last call.
Actually the time for asking these questions is long before IETF-wide Last Call.  We need widespread review of proposals for standards-track documents long before a WG thinks it's finished with those documents.   It's a gaping hole in our process.
Sure. But we have opinionated ADs who read every draft that comes to the IESG. There is no way they have time to participate in all of the working groups. I, as a participant, can read drafts as they are discussed in working groups, because I'm free to ignore all the drafts that are not interesting to me. ADs don't have that luxury.

Unless things have changed a great deal since I was on IESG, ADs do have the luxury of not reading drafts. When I was an AD I tried to read every draft that was in my area (Applications), and every draft that seemed to have the ability to affect applications developers. The lower in the protocol stack, the less likely that I'd feel like I'd have anything useful to say about a draft. Even when I "read" a draft outside of my area, in many cases it was just skimming the draft looking for red flags. I developed a pretty good sense of whether a group had done due diligence or whether there were serious technical omissions that they were trying to ignore. Only in the latter (rare) cases did I feel like such drafts needed more of my attention.

I certainly agree that ADs don't have time to participate in all working groups, or even probably 10% of our working groups. But WGs should be able to periodically summarize what they're doing - what problem they're trying to solve, what approach they're taking, what technologies they're using, what major decisions they've made, what the current sticking points seem to be, what problems are as yet unresolved, what potential for cross-group and cross-area effects have been identified, and what efforts have been made to get the affected parties in the loop. For most groups that summary should be maybe 2-3 pages. The ADs should be able to verify that those summaries are accurate and reasonably complete, or appoint a trusted WG observer other than the chair to review each summary. ADs and other members of the community should be able to view those summaries and comment on their accuracy. And I think it would be reasonable for everyone on IESG to read through those summaries once in awhile - at least for groups that seemed likely to affect their areas of concern. I think that such summaries could actually lessen IESG's workload.
Fix that problem, and most of the conflicts between IESG and WGs that surround DISCUSS votes will go away.
Good reviewers are a scarce resource, and there are 500(*) working group drafts competing for their attention. That's a hard problem to fix.

That's a related but IMO somewhat different problem. Working groups are producing far too many documents. That's one reason (far from the only one) why WGs shouldn't undertake documents that aren't specifically authorized in their charters.

Keith





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