Re: Cross-area review (was Meeting rotation)

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Joel,

On 12/23/2015 9:47 PM, Joel M. Halpern wrote:
I note in your earlier description you commented that these reviews
(whose value you doubt)

Unfortunate that you'd toss that in as a distracting aside, especially since it is not an accurate summary of what I said.


      take up AD time when they should be serving as
managers.    I note that many areas now routinely turn the primary review
over to a directorate.

You are implying that the use of directorate reviews is instead of AD reviews. While sometimes it might be, at other times it isn't.

Since my core point is that AD reviews are a strategic problem, not a strategic benefit, the fact that there are other reviews done is largely unresponsive to my point.


>  The ADs decide how much careful combing they do
after the directorate.  That seems to enable the kind of delegating that
can help, without mandating it, and without having rules that
micro-manage how ADs do their job.

Ahh, good. Another convenient IETF cliche. "Micro-manage" has become such a facile way of dismissing substantive comments. So is the cliche to leave everything up to someone else's discretion.

There are strategic issues, here, Joel. The "AD under lampposts" focus is about requiring or encouraging or expecting area directors to do work that is not (very) productive, takes (significant) time, and (substantially) reduces the pool of area directors, by virtue of making the job's footprint larger than it needs to be.

Worrying about the community's basic requirements and expectations on ADs is as far from micro-managing as one can get.

Looking at AD Discuss text and listening to IESG Telecons[*] shows well-intentioned people who often indulge in pursuit of fine-grained detail that is possibly appropriate from an individual contributor and never appropriate from a second-level manager. Alas, it also often shows ADs who are more inclined to be swayed by their personal preferences than by the formal constraints they are supposed to be operating under.

The current Nomcom's 'general' AD job description includes:

For other Internet-Drafts an AD needs simply to be satisfied that
adequate review has taken place, though many ADs personally review
these documents as well.

That looks entirely compatible with your characterization, and my point is that having /any/ expectation that /any/ AD will review most or all I-Ds that come before the IESG is a mistake. A strategic mistake.

We need to do a much better job of describing the AD job in ways that encourage and require doing specifically the work that the IETF needs to have an AD do, and to very carefully exclude tasks that bloat the job with time-consuming, low-benefit efforts. The efforts do not serve the community well and they reduce the population of AD candidates.

The view that reviews by ADs, themselves, are essential requires ignoring trade-offs and, worse, cherry-picking the data. Let me repeat that even in those very rare cases that an AD catches something major, we should view that as documentation of a very deep and very serious error in a process that let's such basic problems get that far.

Even expecting an AD to be deeply familiar with the documents they are 'sponsoring' is questionable; it's predicate is that the AD should be the primary representative for the work, in spite of not having been a principal in the work. If IESG handling of a specific document is not controversial -- ie, no Discusses -- then the AD doesn't need deep knowledge. If the IESG handling involves controversy, Discusses, or the like, then get some principals to be involved in the discussion, not the second-hand efforts of the AD.i

ADs should worry about basic wg functioning, about community participation in the work, about community assessment of the work, and about the likelihood of community update of the work. Lines those ducks up and the spec will quack, independent of the AD review.

d/


[*] Jari and the rest of the IESG deserve very considerable community thanks for opening the formal telecon meetings to this community observation.

--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net




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