I agree with you and Margaret. My comments below,
On Tuesday, February 25, 2014, Barry Leiba wrote:
On Tuesday, February 25, 2014, Barry Leiba wrote:
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.
I agree totally, and believe still IETF meetings and lists discussions need improvements, and ADs guidance.
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 experience WG chair calling a participant discussion/input as disturbing mail boxes.
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.
I commented before about documentation in this organisation, and IMHO it needs improvement as well.
(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.)
I find it difficult to review and discuss with authors sometimes as well, I like to do it on the list. However, some groups discuss and comment review through private channel so that it always is not easy for IESG or any reviewer to know the dangerous bits.
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 agree, thanks
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.
A policy should guide these activities because it is important to the IETF organisation future and experience. If an organisation has no effective documentations then it will not have experience and will fall in future.
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.
I agree, but just to point out that I experienced one WG document in one WG, while editors are editing issues by DT discussions not the WG discussions, so the editors may not know the rules or there is no much policy for editors, they can edit any thing even without discussion (they just use the WG to adopt and then they do what they like and they may even not acknowledge inputs to discourage participation).
Thanks to you and Margaret for these important comments.
AB