Subject: Re: Work effort? (Re: Proposed Standard and Perfection)

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 07 Mar 2004 18:53:48 -0800

--On 7. mars 2004 17:07 -0800 Dave Crocker <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Harald,
>
> HTA> In the steady state (30 docs/month, currently), perhaps 30
> man-hours/month
>
>
> 30 documents go to Proposed each month?
>
> The steady-state rate of review is the average number of documents that
> go to Proposed.  (well, ok, the average of the number that went to
> proposed 2 years ago.

apologies - wrong number - I was counting documents, not standards-track 
docs. standards-track are slightly more than half that, I think.
check the numbers from Allison's presentation - she is a more careful 
statistician than I am.

> In any event, we can distinguish documents that newly come up to their
> 2-year limit, versus dusting out the closet of those that already hit 2
> years, before this.
>
> Keeping up with the new documents reaching their limit is the
> critical-path activity. Dusting out the closet can take as long as we
> want.

I'd like to tackle both - it seems silly to have all this garbage 
cluttering up the history while applying exacting criteria to the ones that 
had the "luck" to be passed exactly two years ago.

If we have the consensus of the community that we SHOULD reclassify the 
documents, then the dusting out is "just work".

Besides, we should learn something from the experience of going through the 
backlog - there have been a couple of attempts at single-document 
downgrading already, and at least one met with resistance from people 
feeling that their document was "singled out for harsh treatment" (RFC 
1628, UPS MIB, 1994), while reclassification of RFC 1314 (Image file 
format, 1992) as Informational was uncontroversial when Patrik and I tried 
it back in 1999 or thereabouts.
(Both are still listed in the index as Proposed, however....)

                   Harald

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 Mar 2004 14:43:50 -0800

Harald,

>> 2-year limit, versus dusting out the closet of those that already hit 2

HTA> I'd like to tackle both - it seems silly to have all this garbage

My comment did not suggest that older Proposed documents be ignored.

What I said was that they can be dealt with differently from the "steady
state" handling required to handle new documents, as they come to their
time limit.

For doing project planning, there is a very big difference between
on-going requirements and start-up requirements.  Both urgency and
resource allocation can be quite different.

HTA> If we have the consensus of the community that we SHOULD reclassify the
HTA> documents, then the dusting out is "just work".

The amount of work required can affect people's willingness to support
doing a project. Overestimating can make the task seem more daunting
than necessary and thereby reduce support. Underestimating can set
unrealistic expectation and thereby cause community frustration later.

For that matter, a community in crisis about timeliness, productivity,
accountability and funding might wonder how a particular proposal
affects any of these urgent problems, especially when the community is
severely resource limited.

There are many good proposals, but scarce resources mandates setting
priorities.

d/
--
 Dave Crocker <dcrocker-at-brandenburg-dot-com>
 Brandenburg InternetWorking <www.brandenburg.com>
 Sunnyvale, CA  USA <tel:+1.408.246.8253>