Warren, This is very helpful. See inline below. --On Saturday, 20 July, 2019 08:11 -0400 Warren Kumari <warren@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> But, as I understand it, that is precisely what these >> proposals are about: allowing a WG to declare a piece of its >> work as ready to go without review and validation by the rest >> of the IETF. > > Whoa, no no no - that's not the intent, but I think I now > finally understand much more of the disconnect in this thread. > > When Job initially presented his idea it seemed to me (and > still seems to me) that this would solve a bunch of very real > needs, and I started playing with some ideas on how we could > implement something like this. Unsurprisingly I was viewing > this though the lens of my own experiences, and I really > didn't intend marking a draft in this way as carrying as much > weight as people seems to think it would. Another distinction may be important here. Let's assume that the IETF reached consensus that a particular type of document should be called a "Kitten". We all understand what "kitten" means, just as we understand that the LAMPS WG isn't about lighting fixtures. No problem. Now, whether out of marketing needs or simple misunderstanding (or even malice) someone outside reads or is told "kitten document from the IETF" and hears (or wants to hear) either "some sort of feline from the IETF" or just "IETF document". And then, if they are interested in promoting the document, and are in an environment where lions are highly respected, it is presented as "IETF Lion document" or, if they are opposed to the specification or the IETF itself, "IETF person-eating tiger". Now, again, _we_ would never make that mistake. But substitute "Informational RFC" for "kitten" and then replay in your mind every heated discussion we have had (at least since you started participating) about the problems caused when people accidentally or deliberately confuse "RFC" with "[IETF] Internet Standard". Think about the proposed remedies for that preventing Informational or Experimental documents from being numbered and designated as RFCs. Or, only a year ago, the proposal to stop identifying documents from non-IETF Streams as RFCs and giving them RFC numbers. Some important philosophical issues about what we are actually about (see my long note about comparisons to other standards bodies and how they handle documents aside, the problem with having multiple type of documents and finer categories is that, to an outsider or with an incentive to misconstrue, none of it makes any difference. That should have been clear to us the first time marketing materials showed up that said that an Internet-Draft was an "IETF document" and implied it was an Internet Standard. If the IETF produces it, or any IETF subgroup produces it, or it is posted using IETF facilities, we have decades of experience that suggest it will be misconstrued. The marketers make an easy target but, for example, note that everyone who has put an I-D on a resume without clearly identified as a draft, a work in progress, or an expired draft is violating our official rules too. Different incentives, same outcome. And the same risk to them that the marketers have of being found out and never believed again... but that doesn't seem to be enough of a deterrent. It is likely that the more categories of documents "we" have, the easier it is for someone who has incentives to do so to create confusion. And _that_ is what at least some of us are worried about. > I suspect that much of this comes down to poor terminology, > and people (me!) not reevaluating what the term means both to > themselves others - I've been following the thread, but it was > only when I chatted with some people here in Montreal that I > finally realized that the term "stable" means much more > "stable" to people than I was intending it to convey - I > suspect that much of the disconnect here stems from this > terminology issue -- the term "checkpoint" was suggested, and > this is probably much closer to what I was intending. While "checkpoint" or "snapshot" would be far better than "stable", the problem above remains. We would figure out what it meant and, at least most of the time, would get that right. People who suffered from either deep ignorance, laziness about reading definitions or boilerplate, or some incentive to mislead, would do their thing no matter what we called it. > > I wasn't intending marking a draft to allow "a WG to declare a > piece of its work as ready to go without review and validation > by the rest of the IETF." - as I'd initially said, these would > still be drafts, and the "It is inappropriate to use > Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other > than as "work in progress."" type disclaimer should definitely > still apply -- a marked draft (at least in my mind, obviously > I communicated this all poorly) would have much much *much* > less standing than a draft which had passed WGLC - which is > still not "ready to go without review and validation by the > rest of the IETF." but rather "ready to go *for* review and > validation by the rest of the IETF. A "marked" draft would > mainly allow external people to see a *snapshot* of what the > WG has currently agreed to in a document -- from the > "Operators and the IETF" survey > (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-opsawg-operators-ietf-00#se > ction-2.2.2) lots of external people want to follow what the > IETF is doing, but don't have the time or stomach to follow > all the discussions Yep. Got that (and appreciate it). Some of the others arguing for this have been less clear. But, if we have ever had reason to worry about whether a survey that is published as an Informational RFC is construed as a formal recommendation from the IETF about what should be done rather than what some think should be done, then lowering that bar doesn't help. But, taking that document as an example with the understanding that I just glanced at it for the first time, it appears to be an ISOC study. If posting a summary for the information of a WG is helpful then do it - that doesn't require or benefit from special labels. If ISOC wants to publish a summary, they are more than capable of doing that -- they don't need Internet Drafts of any subspecies. If you put it out for IETF LC tomorrow, some jerk might stand up and point out that the international statistical community (including the other ISI, which predates the one more familiar to most IETF participants by about a century) has clear recommendations for information that should be included when anything is portrayed as a "survey' or "survey results" and this document doesn't meet them. That is not an IETF technical topic, but it is a place where a little cross-discipline review could reduce the risk of IETF WGs, at least in the ops area, getting a reputation for unprofessional and sloppy work. As long as it is just an internal working draft, you get to say "we'll get to that later, even if the need to get to it hadn't occurred to you. But, as soon as you hang a flat on it that says "others, outside the IETF and its document development process, might want to pay attention to this", you've launched yourself down a slippery slope. Eliding the rest of your note to save space, one other observation: There are existing, fairly well-defined, rules for naming of I-Ds. The IESG apparently eliminated any notion of enforcing those rules long before you joined it. Your example, draft-opsawg-operators-ietf-00 violates them and no one seems to care. If I were to post a draft on Monday called draft-satan-future-of-IETF, someone might get me for bad taste, identity theft, or blasphemy. but there is no mechanism to take it down. If someone tried, I'm confident someone who defend my right to express myself and compare it to other postings with names that don't follow the rules. So, independent of the details of the proposal and whether it is a good idea, if you ever want I-D names to contain important indicative information, I suggest that you, as an AD, do two things: (1) To the extent possible, clean up your act and the act in your Area. A draft from the OPSAWG, even one that is not being considered for some sort of special status, should be posted as draft-ietf-opsawg-... Any documents named draft-opsawg-... (whether add insult to injury by including "IETF" in the name) such be superceded and taken down unless they posted by Joe (or Mary) Oppsawg and are _not_ WG documents. Start setting an example. Even then, start watching for that important future IETF participant Alice Stable. Perhaps she will be a newcomer in Montreal. (2) Work with the IESG to start enforcing the naming rules. Fix it so that anything that is not draft-ietf-<activeWG>-... draft-<recognized-body>-... (where <recognized body> is a very short list that presumably included IAB, IESG, IRTF, and probably not much more) draft-<author>-... (where <author) is the surname of one of the listed authors) can be taken down at the request of anyone in the community (saving setting an I-D Police role comparable to SAA ones, although that is another possibility). If the IESG has to be involved in case-by-case decisions, it will fail and we will be back to uncontrolled names. This is just a quick idea, but I'd suggest a complaint to the secretariat, notice by them to the authors, 24 hours for the authors to explain why the name is really legitimate, and then the I-D goes away or, if tooling and time permit, is renamed more appropriately. Modifying the posting tool so that drafts with non-conforming names are harder to even post would be another improvement. Not only would that improve the understandability of I-D names within the collection, but it would make any idea of conveying more information through those names at least a bit more plausible. best, john
