Sorry for being late with this: I'm behind, and catching up. Margaret says... > and in many WGs, _all_ of the most important decisions have been made > in a meeting room at an IETF plenary meeting (and merely "confirmed" > on the list) for many years. In other words, most of our work is > _not_ done on the mailing lists, or even by people who are reading > most of the messages that are sent to those lists. Indeed. When I do my document reviews for IESG telechats, I read the shepherd writeups (and really appreciate the good ones!), have a look at the document history in the datatracker and any last-call discussions, and, depending upon what I find, sometimes go look at the working group discussions. There have been times when a search for the document name in the working group list archive looked something like this: [lmnop] New Version Notification - draft-ietf-lmnop-banana-07.txt, internet-drafts [lmnop] New Version Notification - draft-ietf-lmnop-banana-06.txt, internet-drafts [lmnop] New Version Notification - draft-ietf-lmnop-banana-05.txt, internet-drafts [lmnop] New Version Notification - draft-ietf-lmnop-banana-04.txt, internet-drafts [lmnop] New Version Notification - draft-ietf-lmnop-banana-03.txt, internet-drafts In other words, no discussion whatsoever... just document revisions. I would ask the responsible AD where the discussion was that produced each of these revs, and the AD would say, well, this is one of those working groups that does all of its work in the meetings, and they got a lot done on this document at IETF this, and IETF that. So I'd go look at the minutes from those IETF meetings. Guess what I didn't find. I'm sure there was discussion in the meetings, but there was little or nothing documenting it, and no explicit calls for discussion on the mailing list, at least not with the document name associated with it. (It's possible that issues were discussed, and the document name wasn't mentioned, but the chairs and AD didn't help point me at them.) This hasn't happened in a while. It gave me a very uneasy feeling, and I intent to push back harder should it happen again. I believe that we need to be having these discussions on the mailing list. I believe that discussions that are relied on from the meetings need to be minuted in a way that those not present can find and review them. And I believe that we need to have a record of reaching consensus on a document. A series of document revs followed by a last call, with little or no record of discussion, just doesn't make it. Barry