Re: To "lose the argument in the WG"

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On 2/14/2017 12:40 AM, Stewart Bryant wrote:

Yes, it is the prospect of a complete re-run of the argument at IETF LC
that keeps WGs honest.


In theory, perhaps.  In practice, no it doesn't.

What it does do is to help make the IETF process onerous, and therefore aid in making the IETF a place to avoid when possible.

Having folk spend months (or years) working on a detailed specification and then have to go through a detailed defense at the end is disrespectful of their effort. It is also impractical, because it essentially requires re-creating the context for making various decisions made along the way, months (or years) later, to folk who have no skin in the game.

For those rare cases in which there really is a problem that needs fixing, forcing a wg to go through this random defense process mostly speaks to failures in oversight and review that should be happening along the way, not at the end of the process.

And, again, note that it almost never works. While it creates additional work and pain for those who are tired from the lengthy process, it rarely (if ever) produces serious benefit.

For the folk who think this is an essential bit of IETF quality control, please produce documentation of the times this defense is required and compare when it has produced meaningful change and when it hasn't. Just coming up with stray examples of benefits ignores the larger number of cases where it incurs costs without benefits.[*]

To the extent that a working group does need course-correction, then let's look for ways to do that that are effective and efficient and much, much earlier.

d/

[*] Please remember that the trigger for this sub-thread is a sour-grapes effort by an existing wg participant to force review of a (potentially much) earlier wg decision they didn't like. A separate case is of fresh, non-wg eyes that might see something none of the older, more-tired eyes of wg participants caught. The former case really is sour grapes. The latter case could be naivete or it could be insight. Mostly of the time it is the former. That ought to mitigate the certitude of the fresh eyes, but it usually doesn't.

--

  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net




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