Subject: RE: [Icar] Tagging drafts

From: "Wijnen, Bert (Bert)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 13:17:17 +0100

I sort of like thsi idea... however, if it is just something the
author/editor can put in the draft, then there is potential of mis-use
by individuals who just want their document to get wider attention.

Should it be WG chairs that request such specific cross-area review?
Or should they approve such requests?

Another idea could be a generic mailing list where WG chairs can do
a call for CrossArea review? 

Thanks,
Bert 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael A. Patton [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: dinsdag 16 december 2003 3:16
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: [Icar] Tagging drafts
> 
> 
> As someone who actually tries to provide some cross-review, the
> biggest problem I run into is knowing when a draft is in a state for
> this to be useful.  I usually pick out one or two of the announcements
> not in my WGs, but often all I can say after reading them is "get back
> to me after you actually think about this" and even more 
> often "this is
> obviously far enough along that I need to spend hours to understand it
> enough to comment", and I much less often find one at the stage where
> I can do a useful cross-review.
> 
> This could be helped a lot if there was something in the I-D ACTION
> message which indicated this.  Without ANY changes to the tools, a
> first cut at this could be done by the draft authors by a sentence at
> the start of the Abstract.  That might be good enough to get some
> initial test feedback, get a few authors to start trying that and see
> if they get more feedback from more IETFers (although that might be
> hard to measure, so we'd have to rely on anecdotal evidence).
> 
> Longer term, a good technology might be having a token in the draft
> that the I-D ACTION posting could extract.  We can discuss the best
> way to present it.  At first impression I'd like it in the message's
> subject so scans of headers could show it, but the subject lines are
> already pretty crowded, but maybe that should also be addressed.
> 
> 	-MAP
> 
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---

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 06:45:54 -0600

I agree with Michael that knowing that a draft is somewhat stable
helps a lot (I tend to review for lots of editorial nits, and
providing lots of editorial nits for the previous version of a draft
isn't effective).

My impression is that we're trying to minimize new work for the
secretariat in standards production, so one advantage of Michael's
proposal was that no one but the author needed to do anything, and the
secretariat might not even notice that we've adopted this procedure.

If we can't trust document authors to ask for cross-area review,
that's not a good sign.

Can we just try the "un-moderated" version of requesting first, and
see if there's a problem?

Current practice seems to be authors/editors announcing the draft on
mailing lists of other groups ("you might want to look at this"), with
no control (except that many of our WG mailing lists are now
member-only posting, so it takes a little more effort to do the
announcements).

There are 200 or so WG chairs. Who checks that the person requesting
cross-area review is a WG chair? Who checks that a WG chair approved a
request?

In a perfect world, I could imagine monthly e-mails from each (pair
of) AD(s) saying "these drafts are ready for early/late cross-area
review", and that might scale pretty well, but I am loathe to suggest
more work for ADs that doesn't replace other work.

SIR was an unofficial experiment, but even that limited experience
seemed (to me) to indicate that requesting reviews from specific
reviewers was a lot more effective than broadcasting SIR review
requests on the SIRs mailing list. I believe Ted Hardie's plenary
presentation made this point as well ("general calls for help don't
generate a lot of help").

I've learned to ignore Jim Fleming's "advertisements" for post-IPv6
networking protocols. Maybe that's the best we can do with cross-area
review requests ("look at ME!", "no, look at ME!").

Spencer

---

From: Alex Zinin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 14:42:04 -0800

Bert,

> by individuals who just want their document to get wider attention.

I'm trying to decide if it's bad or good :) At the end of the day we
want wider cross-functional review for more documents and more
attention seems to be good. The irony is, of course, that putting the
"sure we are ready for x-func review" label on every other document
could be as bad as not putting it at all

> Or should they approve such requests?

WG chairs doing that would seem reasonable to me.

> a call for CrossArea review?

Yep, see my previous message.

Alex