On 10/20/2013 09:54 PM, Joel M. Halpern wrote: > The obvious risk if one separates WG management from review is that > one could easily get the situation where the manager, in working with > the WG, says that the document needs X, Y, and not Z. And then the > reviewer says "needs Z". And there are more extreme versions of this. > Currently, the ability for the managing AD to say "no, this won't pass > muster" is part of his management tool. If he is not the reviewer, he > seems to have lost an important tool. I hope I am missing something > that would make this sort of approach workable. Without having scanned every suggestion in this thread.... In my opinion, it is critical that it is clear who's got the final say in whether a document is approved or not. At the moment, it's the IESG, and I think it's likely that it should remain the IESG - if approval authority isn't in the same chain of responsibility as management authority, one has to find a way to deal with conflicts between the two - and I think that's not a good way to go. When I was on the IESG, and instituted the General Area Review Team, I chose to trust reviewers to the degree that I would not read the document unless my reviewer said I needed to. But the final decision on the approval call was still mine; the reason I could do this was because I trusted my reviewers. Placing this amount of trust also means that it must be clear what happens if the trust is broken - such a reviewer HAS to serve at the pleasure of the AD. If one wishes to shuffle around the responsibility differently, the equations change. But splitting review from the IESG doesn't have to mean splitting the authority for approval from the IESG. > > Yours, > Joel > > On 10/20/13 3:38 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote: >> On 21/10/2013 03:18, John C Klensin wrote: >> ... >>> Because working together with others on final document reviews >>> and providing a final verification that all necessary bits are >>> in place shouldn't require nearly the job-learning time that the >>> IESG/AD role does, one could consider asking members of that >>> review body to serve only a year or maybe six months, and >>> possibly relax the meeting attendance requirements, >> >> I think we could totally remove attendance requirements. There >> are cases where understanding a document requires background knowledge, >> but if the document doesn't contain pointers to that knowledge, it's >> a defect in the document, not in the reviewer. In fact, we can argue >> that since the acid test for a document is whether a reader who has >> zero IETF experience can understand it without ambiguity, at least >> one reviewer should have limited background knowledge. >> >> I don't think a time limit is the critical issue - it's how many >> documents a given reviewer has to review per year, or to be more >> precise, how many pages. Clearly the burden in pages/year on a >> conscientious AD at the moment is silly. >> >>> either of >>> which should vastly increase the pool of plausible volunteers, >>> including some people we would very much like to have in those >>> jobs but who can't take on the IESG workload or long-term >>> commitment. >>> >>> For an earlier and somewhat different take on this issue and a >>> variation on a proposal, see the long-expired >>> draft-klensin-stds-review-panel-00. >> >> The high-order bit is whether we can separate the functions of >> (a) steering the work of the IETF and (b) applying final quality >> control to the documents. At the moment, these two jobs are bound >> up with each other in the IESG. >> >> Brian >> -- Surveillance is pervasive. Go Dark.