Hi Joel,
Delegating authority without responsibility is a bad idea.
The question of "does an AD have too much responsibility"
seems to be the underlying issue here.
It seems the main IESG areas of responsibility are:
1) Steer the IETF (e.g, approve BoFs, WG charters)
2) Manage all IETF working groups (e.g., deliver milestones)
3) Review all drafts for RFC publication
Why not have Area Managers as well as Area Directors? (split out (2))
They would be responsible for getting WGs in the area
to complete their milestones on time. (e.g, they have WG conflict
resolution authority, not the ADs). The desired skill set focus for an AM would be
management, not technology.
Andy
On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 12:54 PM, Joel M. Halpern <jmh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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.
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