Subject: Defining the terminology of what happens inside a WG - accepting the use of the term "Vetting"

From: "TS Glassey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2007 06:23:42 -0800

Folks - I want to formally put the term "VETTING" into the IETF's 
Dictionary to describe what it is we do to a technology inside a Working 
Group. What follows is my argument for that:

The IETF's WG Flow is an interesting process and needs to be characterized 
from the outside to allow proper references to it inside of the IP-R Flow.

What is it that happens in a WG?
------------------
Because in the IETF... Technology is vetted.

Its my assertion here that the "interpersonal review of the technologies 
under standardization" is "vetting". That term applies to a number of things 
where "something is reviewed by a group of people". See any number of the 
definitions available from dictionaries across the web if needed. For 
instance Wikipedia defines Vetting for Software's as follows.

"Vetting is also a reference to software development. The process of vetting 
code refers to ensuring a build of software meets a set of very high level 
requirements before the build is passed to the quality assurance environment 
for further testing".  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vetting

How this applies to the IETF is pretty simple... the Vetting in a IETF WF is 
the discussion of the design features with the member's of the list through 
NoteWell processes both written and verbal at IETF meetings.  The 
vetting-action itself includes any public review of a submission so it is 
particular to NoteWell and Revision-Filing's of RFC's or version 2 or later 
IETF Drafts as well.

That "control of the quality and design of the software" continues with that 
in order to meet the IETF's Standards Process two independent and 
interoperable instances of said "Protocol Stacks" have to be formally 
implemented and then tested for that interoperability.

If that "proper review and design analysis" isn't vetting then I don't know 
what is.

Adoption of the term Vetting
--------------------------------
To that end I propose the formal adoption of the term "Vetting" to formally 
describe much of the process that happens within a Working Group so that the 
IETF's work-flow processes can be described more in line with what other 
standards processes which use a consensus process do. The term Vetting is 
actually pretty important to the IPR Descriptions as well since the output 
of the Vetting Process is the Intellectual Properties that the IETF is 
producing itself.

[email-masked] is the right place to bring this up
-------------------
Since the IPR-WG has specifically said it will not consider the use of the 
term to describe what IP transfer processes implement, this is the 
appropriate place to bring this request up.

Todd Glassey

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