Subject: re: [Icar] Moving on with ICAR: WG formation and charter

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 15:29:11 -0500

I am highly dubious that a separate WG for cross-functional review
would be desirable.  Cross-functional review is certainly necessary;
however, I don't think that a WG focused on looking just at
cross-functional review in isolation from the rest of the WG process is
likely to produce very useful output.   

IMHO we need to be thinking about how WGs should be doing protocol
engineering, and we should consider such questions as how to do
cross-functional review, and how to shift responsibility between IESG and
WGs, in the context of a discussion about how we should do engineering.

More generally, I think that having lots of separate WGs each looking at
different aspects of WG operation is likely to fragment the discussion
in an unproductive way, and also limit those who see things from a
broader perspective from providing much useful input, by forcing them to
keep track of discussion in multiple WGs.  And I think that especially
in these kinds of dicussions that have broad effects, IETF badly
needs more input from people with "big picture" views.

Keith

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From: Alex Zinin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 14:57:46 -0800

Keith,

  I don't think putting a specific topic in a separate WG means it
  will work in isolation from others. I hope we're better than that.

  To me, it's a question of whether a specific issue is sufficiently
  big, separateable and independent from the rest to benefit from
  dedicated process bandwidth, plus how complex the inter-WG IPC is
  likely to be.

  It seems that we need to improve cross-functional review within the
  IETF anyways, whether we shift the responsibility between the IESG
  and WGs or not. This is not to say that we should not work on the
  bigger picture, we certainly should.
  
  Did you have a suggestion in mind, by the way?
  Thanks

-- 
Alex
http://www.psg.com/~zinin/

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From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 18:27:52 -0500

>   will work in isolation from others. I hope we're better than that.

I don't think such a WG is likely to work in total isolation from the 
others, but I doubt it could be tightly coupled enough with the several 
other fragmented WGs that have been proposed to have confidence in the 
coherence in the collected output of these groups.

>   dedicated process bandwidth,

I think it's a question of misplaced focus -- paying too little 
attention to improving the quality of the original work and too much 
attention to improving the feedback loop.

I'm reminded of the guy who was looking for his lost keys outside his 
house, even though they were inside the house when he last saw them.  
His reason?  "The light is better out here."

>   bigger picture, we certainly should.

I believe that having a separate group working on cross-area review in 
the near future would distract attention from work on the bigger 
picture, and that the former work would be in danger of being 
irrelevant if not informed by the big picture work.  So I think the 
work on the bigger picture needs to precede the detailed work on 
cross-area review, even if the latter is eventually done by a separate 
WG.

>   Did you have a suggestion in mind, by the way?

I think we need to define the process known as Internet protocol 
engineering - i.e., the process we expect WGs (as well as individuals, 
for individual submissions) to follow in producing protocol 
specifications.  This process needs to include cross-area review, but 
it needs to include lots of other things also.

I think we need to invite proposals for what this process should look 
like, and have some informal public discussion and refinement of those 
proposals, before we try to form a WG to sort it out.

I think we need to try the new process in a small number of working 
groups, and get feedback from WG participants and other parties, before 
we try to adopt it on a widespread basis.

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 18:57:02 -0500

>   dedicated process bandwidth, plus how complex the inter-WG IPC is

To be honest, I'm not completely clear on what the subject is, or
at least not clear enough to be able to answer the questions you
ask.  We've actually got several review problems.  One is early
review and another is cross-area review (there are others, but
I think these are the most pressing).  Failures in these areas have
overlapping but somewhat different results, in that early review
(i.e. review against the charter, or review for quality within the
charter) failures tend to allow the working group to produce bad results
while cross-area review failures can lead to work that's incoherent
in the broader context, work that's substantially the same as
work in another area, and so on.

Some of what's been discussed or experimented with already, like
SIRS, has tended to focus on the early review problem, but I'm inclined
to think that can be solved with a bigger hammer (making better use of 
WG
technical advisors, for example).  The cross-area review problem
is a structural/scaling problem and one that I think may
require process or structural changes.  That's actually a pretty
big deal and might have broader implications for the kind of
organization we are, whether we're bottom-up/volunteer/etc. or
we're more top-down/authoritarian.  This discussion needs to
continue to involve the entire organization (or those who are
interested, anyway).  I'm not sure that we can talk about this in
isolation from questions about area boards, etc.

At the same time, in watching some of the debates that we're having
about organizational change it looks to me like there's a tendency
to deadlock over issues like making sure that we've got authority
structures that match our responsibility structures, and it's
interfering with our ability to make progress.  At some point we have
to rely on the good will of the participants, and if we don't have
that we're hosed, anyway.  I'm not opposed to the creation of a
working group but I think that if one is created (and this is true
of other "improvement" efforts, as well) 1) the partipants, or at the
very least the chairs and the responsible AD, need to be committed to
the possibility that the outcome might be to maintain the status quo,
and 2) we may need to be a little non-traditional about how we ratify
its output, which is something that needs a lot of further discussion.

A nit on the specific proposal: it's not clear to me that "peer-to-
peer" reviews are the right answer, and in the context of the IETF I'm
not even sure what "peer" means.  More generally, I think I'd be happy
never to see the phrase "peer to peer" again.  Let's try to figure out
what the actual review problem(s) is/are that need to be addressed and
use words that describe those.

Melinda

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From: Alex Zinin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 12:46:15 -0800

Melinda,

> ask.  We've actually got several review problems.

<discussion of review types>

I don't think I agree with your categorization of review types,
but it's a topic of it's own, so I'm taking this to a separate thread.

> ... The cross-area review problem

My understanding is that questions like "area boards" would be exactly
within the scope of ICAR. On the issue of "isolation". Creating a WG
helps scoping the discussion, setting focused goals, etc., but it does
not lock out the rest of the organization. In other words, we would
not be creating a closed group of people to discuss a problem without
paying attention to the rest of the issues, but rather providing a
forum for the community to discuss a subset of issues. If it turns
out that process or structural changes are needed, we could represent
them in the form of recommendations that would then be discussed
within the context of a bigger picture.

> its output, which is something that needs a lot of further discussion.

I think this is reasonable, though I personally think it's unlikely
that the output will be something like "we're fine here, no changes
needed". I do see how the existing process could remain unchanged and
some clarifications and suggestions made to improve it within the
current framework.

> use words that describe those.

OK, let's take this to the other thread I'll start.

Thanks.

Alex

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From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 09:43:47 -0500

On Wednesday, December 17, 2003, at 03:46 PM, Alex Zinin wrote:
> within the scope of ICAR.

But not uniquely within the scope, since the area boards, at least
in the proposal we've seen, also have other roles.  If they don't
have other roles they're not area boards, but some sort of document
review board.  This ties into your later comments and subsequent
posts about how to coordinate changes within the context of the big
picture (as well as the problem of how we, as an organization,
ratify Big Decisions).

Melinda