Dave Crocker <dhc@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > We have been having some very serious recruitment problems for a number > of years now. This year's crisis was entirely predictable. > > The only way the situation will change meaningfully is to make the job > less onerous... <hat="Senior Narrative Scribe"> Having followed a strong majority of formal telechats for five years, it is blindingly obvious to me that - there are too many documents to review, and - there are too many Working Groups to manage; and it keeps getting worse. :^( The fact that the IESG gets through the agendas for these telechats fools some folks into believing the job is possible -- but the rest of us aren't fooled. > Re-define the bloody job... Here I part ways with Dave. (It never seems to take long... :^) There is nothing wrong with reviewing documents. There is nothing wrong with managing Working Groups. There are just too many of both! I can't very well name a WG that shouldn't be on the list for an AD to manage (I'll cover that issue in a separate email); but we have a perfect example right now of a document that the IESG shouldn't be responsible to review. Pete Resnick's draft-resnick-on-consensus is an individual submission seeking Informational status. From its Abstract: ] ] This document is a collection of thoughts on what rough consensus is, ] how we have gotten away from it, and the things we can do in order to ] really achieve rough consensus. Yet, if it is published as an Informational RFC, it will have boilerplate saying: ] ] This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force ] (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has ] received public review and has been approved for publication by the ] Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Not all documents ] approved by the IESG are a candidate for any level of Internet ] Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 5741. Thus some folks have quite understandably objected to it being published, even as Informational. IESG review of it is really redundant (and I'd be surprised if any AD puts a DISCUSS on it once Pete is satisfied with it). Pete will do any appropriate consensus-seeking before he signs off an it. But there's that boilerplate! There's just no way a document like this can get genuine "consensus of the IETF community". Yet it most truly deserves an IETF-wide Last Call. IMHO there are _many_ documents being published as Informational which deserve an IETF-wide Last Call, but don't deserve to go before an IESG telechat and ask ADs to sign off on "consensus of the IETF community". Documents such as this should represent the _author's_ opinions after a Last Call process -- claiming "IETF community" consensus detracts from that, and even _formal_ IESG review without that boilerplate would detract from it. </hat> Can we get there from here? I don't know. :^( Removing the IESG review would be a process change; and we've had very poor luck with those recently... But even changing the boilerplate would help... -- John Leslie <john@xxxxxxx>