Subject: Re: comments on draft-aboba-sg-experiment-03.txt

From: Bernard Aboba <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2007 11:48:56 -0700 (PDT)

John Klensin said:

"	(2) As the discussion goes on, if appears to me that, in
	practice, an SG is little more than a normal WG with an
	unusual set of charter-time constraints."

No, because WGs cannot be formed to come up with a WG charter (or
RFC 2418 Section 2.1 criteria for WG formation). 

	"The worst risk associated with introducing
	SGs is that, just as we have evolved from "A BOF, or
	sometimes two, are optional steps to help get a WG
	organized and focused"  to "BOFs are almost always
	required", we might evolve into the expectation of
	spending one or more IETF meetings in SGs, as well as an
	additional meeting or two in BOFs, before generating a
	typical WG charter."

I agree that this would be a bad thing -- and that's why the draft 
indicates that the experiment should not short-circuit creation of WGs 
that already satisfy the criteria.  In any case, the experiment only lasts 
18 months, and it seems unlikely that the IETF would devolve that quickly. 

        "In the notation of Lakshminath's
	recent chart, we have moved from "Idea -->  WG" being
	the normal case, to "Idea -->  BoF-1 --> BoF-2 --> WG"
	being the normal case"

Do the data back up this assertion?  Quite a few WGs have been 
formed after a single BOF, or if two BOFs were required, then the agenda of the 
second BOF was more like that of a WG than a BOF.  

"to some risk of making "Idea --> BoF-1  --> Bof-2 --> SG --> WG" normal."

I am personally not very enamored of this case.  If the second BoF fails, 
my inclination would be say "that's it".   I'm also not sure if a SG can 
be formed without a first BOF, because the document currently states that 
interest is a pre-requisite for SG formation, and how do we gauge that 
without at least one BOF?  

So IMHO, the "common case" is:

Idea --> BoF --> SG --> WG or nothing. 

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From: Bernard Aboba <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2007 15:32:55 -0700 (PDT)

Brian Carpenter said:

"I'm afraid that this would allow people to game the IETF by abusing
the SG mechanism to give their effort an appearance of open-ended
status. We probably don't want to see CV's including lines like
"chair of IETF foobar Study Group, 2008-2011"."

That would be scary indeed.  The basic idea is to provide clear goals and 
feedback on status -- and encourage the participants to make quick 
progress.  Nothing clears the mind better than an upcoming deadline, 
particularly one that is difficult to extend. 

Frankly, if a SG can't come up with consensus on a WG charter and an 
explanation of why the RFC 2418 criteria are satisfied within the 6 to 12 
month initial milestone, the odds of WG success are not very good either.