On 9/25/14 7:13 PM, Eric Burger wrote: > Interesting. From 1998 on it looks like we go from 10% of ID’s > becoming RFCs to 5%. A combination of having a typical RFC being > published after draft-15, as well as a ton of -00’s that go nowhere, > perhaps? Well, we don't know what the lag time was, or how that may have changed during that period (but we can guess!). I found problem statements by doing a repository search, which means that I only counted one instance rather than having a per-revision-based count. Even so, counting only one revision[*], the number of "problem statement" drafts grew very quickly in the mid-aughties, a time when the total number of submissions appears to have been relatively stable. Anyway, the total numbers are small but to the extent that we no longer seem to be able to undertake new work without a "problem statement" I'd suspect that this may be contributing to process delays. Also, I have a broader problem with "problem statements" in that 1) I think a charter should be relatively complete to start with, and 2) often problem statements represent something that someone thinks would be interesting to work on rather than a technically mature idea that would otherwise satisfy what used to be some of our criteria for taking on new work - basically, certainty that the people involved can actually solve the problem being laid out and have some concrete, workable ideas about how to do so. I think it's not only our slowness to complete documents that suggests that we may be taking on some less productive aspects of other standards bodies, but increased process ossification (problem statement-> use-cases->requirements->gap-analysis->architecture->maybe-one-day- we'll-publish-a-protocol-eventually-perhaps) as well. Melinda [*] the exception to the one-revision count was when an individual submission was resubmitted as a working group draft. This is a count, by year, of the number of drafts which were submitted and which contained the phrase "problem statement" in their title: year # of problem statement drafts 1997 2 1998 1 1999 0 2000 1 2001 5 2002 10 2003 9 2004 8 2005 15 2006 36 2007 28 2008 32 2009 23 2010 29 2011 32 2012 25 2013 34 2014 40