--On Monday, July 29, 2013 01:37 -0400 Brian Haberman <brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >... > One of the things that I ask the Internet Area chairs to do is > send in a summary of their WG after each IETF meeting. Those > summaries generally give folks a good idea of the current > state of each WG. I post those summaries on the Internet Area > wiki. An alternative that would work as well is to have each > WG post summaries to their own wikis. Each WG has a wiki > available via their Tools page (e.g., > http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/6man/trac/wiki). > > I like seeing the summaries from my chairs and I have gotten > feedback from participants that they find them quite useful > for keeping up with WGs that are tangential to their primary > focus. I would encourage every WG chair to periodically > summarize the state of their WG/drafts. Dave and a few other ancients will recall that there was a time when there was a requirement for ADs to put together per-meeting "Area Reports", which went into the minutes. Unless ADs were masochists who wanted to do all the work themselves, that pretty much required that sort of status reports that he and Brian are talking about. It also ensured that ADs were aware of what was going on in all of the WGs for which they were responsible and that, if there were two ADs in an area, they were talking with each other. If those expectations were not met, someone observing that would presumably have something very concrete to tell the Nomcom. In the context of the current discussion, a set of well-written and frequently-updated area reports could also be a big help to a newcomer trying to navigate WG names and acronyms. I agree that it would probably help to be more descriptive about WG names rather than looking for things that will make cute acronyms. Whether we move in that direction or not, most newcomers and isolated/remote participants are going to find it easier to identify an Area of interest than a specific WG. A well-written Area Report that includes brief descriptions of the main focus of each WG along with current status information would be, IMO, a huge help in matching people and specific interests. I think a Wiki or equivalent would be a fine way to maintain such pages but, given how well we do about keeping benchmarks and similar information up to date and the advantages deadlines seem to bring, I'd like to see at least snapshots or the equivalent in meeting minutes. john