Subject: [edu-team] Bouncing an idea

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2006 13:42:19 +0200

I believe that the IESG wiki is quite a success and helped enormously
in bridging from the old to the new ADs. If you aren't familiar
with it, please spend a few minutes at
http://www1.tools.ietf.org/group/iesg/trac/wiki/WikiStart

Now, I find myself wondering whether a similar wiki for and by WG Chairs
would be useful.

"WG Chair Guide - Everything a Chair Needs to Know but Was Afraid  to Ask"

It would mean finding a few activist volunteers to take the lead in generating
a structure and initial content, and some simple wikipedia-like rules to
keep things under control - but with 200 WG chairs around, I don't think
there would be any shortage of text.

What do you think? We certainly have material from past WG training
lunches that could help create the initial content. And then we'd need
to find those few volunteers, and after that it would be self-managing.
Henrik is willing to host the wiki on the tools server.

Does this pass the laugh test?

    Brian

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From: Avri Doria <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2006 08:04:05 -0400

Hi,

Seems a good idea to me.  Though I am not sure who is going to  
volunteer to set it up, maintain it and make sure that erroneous  
information does not get put there as fact.   This could involve a  
fair amount of volunteering and someone whose judgement of what is  
correct is trusted by the powers that be.

a.

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From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2006 07:13:13 -0500

If I may express three opinions...

One challenge that we've had in the WG chair training/WG leadership training 
is that our BCP text allows enormous flexibility, and we have a relatively 
short period of time for the class. We've solved that problem, I think, by 
choosing one or two alternatives, out of the "legal" choices, and presenting 
our choices. For example, you would be hard-pressed to look at the current 
WG leadership training and find support for WGs that "adopt" an unwritten 
draft, so that the first time the working group sees the text, it's already 
draft-ietf-foo, but that is a legal working group style, and some working 
groups use that style.

It would be good to be pretty clear on your expectations for the wiki - you 
could expect "let a hundred flowers bloom", or you could expect chairs to 
keep changing each other's text until a "consensus" emerges. I don't care 
which you want, but please ask for what you want.

Second, it's tempting to focus on WG chairs, but we've already combined the 
WG chairs and WG editors training into one tutorial, and it's likely that as 
WG secretaries become more numerous, it would be good to involve them as 
well. It would be good to be pretty clear on who can edit the wiki - I don't 
believe I can edit the IESG wiki, can I? but a strict limit of current WG 
chairs might have unintended consequences, including limiting input from 
former chairs who have a lot of perspective (hint - now that newtrk has 
concluded, Scott is co-chair of IEPREP, which has one WG draft listed on 
their charter page. You might want to come up with a framework that doesn't 
exclude Scott when IEPREP forwards their last draft and concludes).

The third challenge is expectations about what the wiki says, beyond what 
BCP text requires/supports. The WG leadership class does "go beyond" BCP 
text, but not a lot beyond that text. After looking at the wiki and at the 
WG chairs mailing list, I have to expect that there will be a lot of things 
that are useful for WG chairs to know, but aren't in current BCP text. It 
would be good to be pretty clear how the wiki would relate to the BCP text.

Thanks,

Spencer

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2006 14:53:43 +0200

This *has* to be essentially self-organizing and self-moderating, which
is why I referred to a wikipedia like setup - probably some sort of
committee to decide when a page needs to be reverted to its previous
state (so that something that proves to be contentious can be
struck out, but not arbitrarily). But I am not too worried about that,
if the people with write access are all known identities - if we
inldude everybody whose name appears on any WG charter page, that
is still a village sized community and social effects will apply.

(In answer to Spencer - only ADs can modify the IESG wiki, and I think
we left the recent ex-ADs registered for a while too. But we consciously
made it world readable. And BTW, Google has it: "unwritten rules of the IETF process"
gets exactly one Google hit.)

     Brian

Spencer Dawkins wrote:
> One challenge that we've had in the WG chair training/WG leadership 
> training is that our BCP text allows enormous flexibility, and we have a 
> relatively short period of time for the class. We've solved that 
> problem, I think, by choosing one or two alternatives, out of the 
> "legal" choices, and presenting our choices. For example, you would be 
> hard-pressed to look at the current WG leadership training and find 
> support for WGs that "adopt" an unwritten draft, so that the first time 
> the working group sees the text, it's already draft-ietf-foo, but that 
> is a legal working group style, and some working groups use that style.
> 
> It would be good to be pretty clear on your expectations for the wiki - 
> you could expect "let a hundred flowers bloom", or you could expect 
> chairs to keep changing each other's text until a "consensus" emerges. I 
> don't care which you want, but please ask for what you want.
> 
> Second, it's tempting to focus on WG chairs, but we've already combined 
> the WG chairs and WG editors training into one tutorial, and it's likely 
> that as WG secretaries become more numerous, it would be good to involve 
> them as well. It would be good to be pretty clear on who can edit the 
> wiki - I don't believe I can edit the IESG wiki, can I? but a strict 
> limit of current WG chairs might have unintended consequences, including 
> limiting input from former chairs who have a lot of perspective (hint - 
> now that newtrk has concluded, Scott is co-chair of IEPREP, which has 
> one WG draft listed on their charter page. You might want to come up 
> with a framework that doesn't exclude Scott when IEPREP forwards their 
> last draft and concludes).
> 
> The third challenge is expectations about what the wiki says, beyond 
> what BCP text requires/supports. The WG leadership class does "go 
> beyond" BCP text, but not a lot beyond that text. After looking at the 
> wiki and at the WG chairs mailing list, I have to expect that there will 
> be a lot of things that are useful for WG chairs to know, but aren't in 
> current BCP text. It would be good to be pretty clear how the wiki would 
> relate to the BCP text.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Spencer
>

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From: "James Kempf" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2006 10:23:26 -0700

Sounds like a splendid idea to me. I have some stuff I'd like to contribute.

            jak