On Sat, Nov 7, 2015 at 8:59 PM, Michael Richardson <mcr+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Randy Bush <randy@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> until the community' communicates to the nomcom, iesg, and iab that a
> change to a more reality and implementation based culture is needed, the
> ITUification of the ietf will continue; we will have even more managers,
> document inflators, .... until we send a message by replacing some
> underperforming wg chairs, moribund wgs will abound.
I think that I can say that the nomcom has heard this in multiple ways.
What we can *do* about it, is another question.
Agreed - the set of candidates and the spread among them provides a limited
range of choice. There are always trade-offs and it's hard to prioritize a single
issue among all of them.
The nomcom used to ask the question:
"The AD job is a 50% commitment" (and the joke was: 50% of an 80 hour week)
"Are you going to be able to make this level of commitment?"
The nomcom now asks a different question:
"The AD job is supposed to be a 50% commitment, but has grown.
What will you do to return it to a 50% commitment?"
There is a big concern that you and others have expressed that we are only
able to have ADs from big companies, that small companies can not afford the
time to provide an AD... or a WG chair... or a core document editor.
This is a serious problem. I'm also concerned that ADs and the IESG have
time and focus to think about the steering and future strategy and improvement
part. There's a large part of the AD job which is the daily "making the donuts"
(aka progressing the drafts) but that is only a piece of the job.
So putting the quality where the quality belongs: at the Internet Standards
level, is I think, important.
How many people on this list have encourage that an RFC go to Internet Standard?
Who can articulate why it is useful? I've tried to encourage on one document when
I saw that a bis could happen anyway and there weren't significant normative
dependencies. When there is non-trivial work to verify the interoperable implementations
of each aspect, the benefit of doing the work needs to be better understood by
the community.
I do think that the IETF would be very well served by having many more Internet
Standards RFC - but we have to find a way to motivate people to do the work. Trying
to reduce the work has been done (2-level instead of 3, ability to do status-changes,
etc.) but I don't see it being sufficient.
> the nomcom and the i* need to take some mean pills. and we need to tell
> them it's not only ok, but demanded.
The nomcom doesn't replace WG chairs, it replaces ADs that don't replace WG
chairs... but the set of people that can effectively (i.e. are "confirmable")
become ADs is... the set of WG chairs, plus some secretaries. So another
reason to replace chairs more often is so that more people become experienced
enough to become ADs.
We *have* to grow more WG chairs and secretaries and encourage others to try
shepherding a draft or more to start learning more about the process. We also need
to have some better training on the *why* behind much of the process, because
there's a lot of "one size doesn't fit all" and without understanding the reasons and
motivations, it's easy to do the process and fail to meet the goals.
I know that I tend to think that we have a lot of the same WG chairs; when I did
numbers for Routing, we have 11 new WG chairs out of 45 total since I became an
AD.
Regards,
Alia