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

From: [email-masked] (Scott Bradner)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 09:42:22 -0500 (EST)

>  Steven Belovin and I will be taking care of the pre-WG discussion on
>  ICAR for the IESG.
> 
>  Before we go any further, I would like to solicit feedback from the
>  community on the following points:
>  
>   1. Do you believe that a WG should be formed to work on improving
>      IETF cross-functional review (see IESG message [Ref1] for more
>      detail)?

1/ imho the cross-functional review is one of the main things that
   makes the IETF "standards" get the industry support that they do-
   it is a critical part of the IETF process
2/ leaving this review to the IESG-review stage has occasionally meant
   that major issues show up very late in the game, sometimes after
   products based on the IDs have begun to ship and produced great
   annoyance in working groups
3/ thus it would be good to figure out a way to get at least some of
   the cross-functional review earlier in the development process
4/ working groups have been the traditional way that the IETF has
   discussed issues of this type
5/ working groups tend to subset the relevent people so that the 
   discussion does not involve all the IETF participants that it should
6/ any work on this topic relates closely to other efforts to rethink
   parts of the IETF process (changing the WG chair role, newtrk etc)
   it would seem to be hard to talk about this topic in isolation 
7/ a working group might be a reasonable way to proceed as long as
   the working group had a mandate to work closely with other
   process change efforts but coordinating the various disussions
   may be a hard thing to do if they are in seperate WGs
8/ creating a WG to explore this area would not be the worst way
   to proceed but maybe it would be better to have more of an 
   umbrella WG that deals with all of the change-process topics
   in one place (like poission used to do)
9/ any working group dealing with the process change issues should
   not be chaired by 
	an IESG or IAB member
	anyone who is generally identified by the community as being
	   associated with a particular strong position on the issues

>   If so:
> 
>   2. Would you be willing to actively participate in this WG (by
>      contributing to or reviewing the documents, participating
>      in the discussions, etc.)?

yes

>   3. Please review the part in [Ref1] that provides a preliminary
>      description of the WG and send your comments. The text in the
>      message is likely to be used for the WG charter if there's
>      sufficient support to form the WG.

the text looks fine to me

Scott

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---

From: Alex Zinin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 13:01:53 -0800

Scott,

  Thanks for the input.

  BTW, you are the second person whom I hear from about some
  sort of coordination/umbrella group to tie the pieces together.
  Do you think something like a directorate be a good idea, or
  do we also need a "bigger picture" WG?

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

---

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 21:21:16 -0600

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Alex Zinin" <[email-masked]>
To: "Scott Bradner" <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2003 3:01 PM
Subject: Re: [Icar] Moving on with ICAR: WG formation and charter

>   do we also need a "bigger picture" WG?

I am not Scott Bradner, and I do not think I am channeling him, but
... I am also worried about the coordination issue.

A working group to watch other working groups doesn't seem like a
working group to me.

It may be a well-kept secret, but there is a General Directorate
already in place (see
http://www.alvestrand.no/ietf/gen/directorate.html for details). It
could be used to keep the many pieces straight, but is currently
working to keep Harald Alvestrand straight, and that's a full-time job
already ...

Seriously - directorates are officially creatures serving an AD, not
performing a function. We could create a Process Directorate, but it
would be more straightforward to call it something else, if it's
actually supposed to do things like summarize and rationalize multiple
efforts.

Spencer