Subject: Re: RE: [RPSEC] Consensus calls

From: Radia Perlman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 07:56:16 -0800

> How might we "just add the security experts" to other groups?

This gives me a chance to rant about one of my pet issues. :-)

If we want more cross-collaboration (and we do!), we need to make
it easy for someone to come up to speed on what's going on in a group.
It isn't reasonable to expect someone (especially someone who
is doing us a favor by agreeing to help us) to have to read years of
email archives, or get bogged down in details of what is, without
any hints written down of why things are the way they are, or learn
obscure jargon, or slog through specs that people admit are incomprehensible.

Some ideas are: having companion tutorial documents which skip the
details that aren't relevant to conceptual understanding, and which
also document the arguments (on both sides) of issues that were
controversial and all sorts of folklore that would
not usually get written down because "everyone knows it by now",
an official person charged with periodically summarizing
email threads (perhaps a person appointed by the WG chair for each specific
issue), perhaps at the area meeting having a summary, not just of which
names of documents are in which stage in the official process, but a summary
of what the group is about, someone from the group willing to sit down
one-on-one with someone wanting to come up to speed (I find this particularly
helpful when trying to understand another area).

I'm certainly not implying that the Routing area is any more obscure than
any other area, by the way. And most of the above ideas are being done
sometimes. But I don't think it hurts to keep reminding people about it. :-)

Radia

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From: Tony Tauber <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 16:33:50 +0000 (GMT)

OK, really a tangent, but...

On Thu, 11 Dec 2003, Radia Perlman wrote:

> If we want more cross-collaboration (and we do!), we need to make it
> easy for someone to come up to speed on what's going on in a group.
> It isn't reasonable to expect someone (especially someone who is
> doing us a favor by agreeing to help us) to have to read years of

I agree.  In an effort to get up to speed in this way about different
things, one often find the only alternative to dry specifications is
either journalism (trade rags) or vendor whitepapers (marketing).
It'd be nice to think some alternative is possible, to be sure.

> controversial and all sorts of folklore that would not usually get
> written down because "everyone knows it by now", an official person

Documenting the unspoken political undercurrents, now that's the hard part!

Tony

> charged with periodically summarizing email threads (perhaps a
> person appointed by the WG chair for each specific issue), perhaps
> at the area meeting having a summary, not just of which names of
> documents are in which stage in the official process, but a summary
> of what the group is about, someone from the group willing to sit
> down one-on-one with someone wanting to come up to speed (I find
> this particularly helpful when trying to understand another area).
>
> I'm certainly not implying that the Routing area is any more obscure
> than any other area, by the way. And most of the above ideas are
> being done sometimes. But I don't think it hurts to keep reminding
> people about it. :-)
>
> Radia

---

From: Jean-Jacques Puig <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 17:35:06 +0100

> helpful when trying to understand another area).

Yeah. I found this quite appropriate with ikev2 and it certainly makes
sense when a group eventually reach to a decision on an non-obvious
topic.

However, I would have expected such documents to be long life (for ikev2
rationale | tutorial), and to last even after the actual work is over:
these also help in understanding choices that were done for the end doc.
This information is still valuable.

I support this approach. This is all the more important here because we
may reach to conclusions some more focused WG would not have agreed on.

-- 
Jean-Jacques Puig

[homepage] http://www-lor.int-evry.fr/~puig/