On 7/22/15 11:02 AM, John C Klensin wrote: > (1) We did not hesitate to shut them down if they were > not productive. I don't want a rigid rule because I > think we all know that, in practice, some WGs move at a > different pace than others, but it is important that we > be able to recognize "not meeting expectations and > making reasonable progress" and act on it. My mental model for how-things-work in the IETF is based on the working group secretaries situation - there was a sense that working group chairs were overloaded and in some cases not doing their jobs, and rather than remove a non-functioning chair or add another chair, a decision was made to add a new role (wg secretary) and an effort to formalize that role. That is to say, when things aren't working we tend to add more structure and more layers rather than removing structure and layers. Because this tends to happen, I am going to find it difficult to support a process change that is structured around an assumption that when things go badly groups will be shut down and chairs will be fired. I basically like this proposal, although I'm going to tend to like any proposal that reduces leadership workload and that pushes a chartering decision back beyond the point at which a typical working group transitions from initial enthusiasm to committed core. But I think we need to deal with the IETF as it is, which means a growing core of professional standardizers among both the participant and leadership (suggesting that people will basically work on anything, regardless of actual utility) and a predisposition to add goo rather than to remove it and against saying "no" to established efforts and chairs (which also goes to your fourth criterion, that sunk effort is not a guarantee of publication or standardization). Melinda