Subject: Re: WG Review: Recharter of Internationalized Domain Names in Applications, Revised (idnabis)

From: Thomas Narten <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:17:46 -0400

Looking at this recharter, the immediate question I had was "what has
actually changed in the charter?" so I can figure out if I care.

I gather there is one very small change. But you'd have to be a WG
insider to know this.

Also, reading through the charter, it reads like it was written a year
and a half ago (which it was), and parts of the text in the charter
are OBE, so just reading the charter as is gives a misleading picture
of where things currently stand. 

I guess I'm raising a bit of a meta point here that this recharter
announcement is not very helpful to the general community, which seems
bad. And if the charter needs to be updated, it really should be
updated to reflect the current state of play. 

In particular:

 - it is not easy to figure out what has actually changed relative
   the current charter (this could have been handled by a short note
   providing context as part of the  announcement).

 - it includes actions of the form "will do" that I believe have
   already been done. (e.g., there are 6 WG documents, not 4 as the
   charter suggests, the design team is presumably no longer driving
   this, as the documents are fully WG ones now, and the WG is not
   doing an "extended review" of the DT output, etc.)

Now, I suspect that it was decided to minimize the amount of work
needed to recharter and thus just update the one or two important
sentences in the charter, and I sympathize with that desire. But I
would also hope we could at least update it so that the average IETF
reader (or anyone interested in IDNs for that matter) could read the
charter and understand the current state of play. I don't think it
would take a lot of effort to update it, and I'm not calling for any
subtantive changes. They should all be editorial, so additional
changes should not be controversial.

IESG Secretary <[email-masked]> writes:

> Goals and Milestones:
> Apr 2008     WG formation
> May 2008     Decision on form and structure of the WG document set
> Sep 2008     WG Last Call on WG document set
> Nov 2008     IETF Last Call on WG document set

Oops!

Thomas

---

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:39:42 -0400

Dear IESG,

I can't think of ANYONE who wouldn't be better off if we published deltas 
for WG charter revisions when we ask for comments. We can each trivially 
produce our own deltas, but if you want feedback from the community, 
providing deltas is likely to get more (and more helpful) feedback.

If the approach taken also accommodated the kind of charter thrashing where 
Robert could distribute two revisions of SIP-CLF before IETF 75, distribute 
three revisions to the proposed charter three times during IETF 75 based on 
hallway and meeting room discussions, and send out a "here's where the 
proposed charter is" e-mail (with a trail showing how we got there) after 
IETF 75, that would be even better. Robert is good and has SIP-CLF charter 
revisions under source code control, but it would be superb if all of the 
proposed revisions were under source code control at the same location.

Much like we now do for Internet-Drafts... :D

IMO, of course.

Thanks,

Spencer

> _______________________________________________
> Ietf mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:59:04 -0400

--On Wednesday, August 19, 2009 13:39 -0400 Spencer Dawkins
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> Dear IESG,
> 
> I can't think of ANYONE who wouldn't be better off if we
> published deltas for WG charter revisions when we ask for
> comments. We can each trivially produce our own deltas, but if
> you want feedback from the community, providing deltas is
> likely to get more (and more helpful) feedback.
> 
> If the approach taken also accommodated the kind of charter
> thrashing where Robert could distribute two revisions of
> SIP-CLF before IETF 75, distribute three revisions to the
> proposed charter three times during IETF 75 based on hallway
> and meeting room discussions, and send out a "here's where the
> proposed charter is" e-mail (with a trail showing how we got
> there) after IETF 75, that would be even better. Robert is
> good and has SIP-CLF charter revisions under source code
> control, but it would be superb if all of the proposed
> revisions were under source code control at the same location.
> 

Hmm.  Maybe that thought is more important and useful than you
may have realized.   

I'm not sure that having the charter process get more and more
formalized is a good idea.  In fact I suspect, for several
reasons, that it is a bad one and, in many cases, the cause of
delays in getting work progressed with no good reason.  

However, it seems clear that we are going down that path.  If we
are, then perhaps it is time to start actually posting charter
drafts as I-Ds, taking advantage of all of the mechanisms we
have for posting those documents, dealing with revisions and
diffs, etc.   If the IESG were to encourage the use of 
   draft-charter-foo-NN.txt
for drafts of a charter for a WG with a tentative/preliminary
acronym of "foo", many of the issues with different versions
floating around, inability to track changes, etc., would just
disappear... without inventing any really new mechanisms.

Those I-Ds would obviously not ever be published as RFCs.
Approved charters could still be posted onto WG web pages by
copying (not reference).  But, as a charter-development
mechanism, using the I-D mechanism could actually reduce the
burdens on ADs and others to maintain pre-WG pages, etc. -- and
reducing load on ADs is always, IMO, A Good Thing.

> IMO, of course.

Mine too.

    john

---

From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 22:26:17 +0300

It is essential that we can easily show differences and explain the 
rationale behind a particular change. Right now the public charter 
review process rarely does that. For contrast, when I recharter a 
working group I usually send a message to IESG, IAB, and few of our 
directorates. The message contains:

- explanation of what has happened in the real world or IETF to justify 
a change
- the new charter text
- a diff (I simply run rfcdiff on the old and new texts and attach a 
.html file, or put it on my website)

But what goes out on the public call for review is a stripped down 
version: just the new charter text. I agree that its very hard to parse 
from the end result what the rationale or the difference was. This is 
made even harder by some formatting and HTML issues that one would 
typically encounter when trying to look at the IETF web charter and 
another version in an e-mail. I think an improvement here would be 
useful. I think there's been a few times when I have posted a separate 
e-mail explaining the rationale and changes, as a reply to the 
ietf-announce mail. But I certainly have not done it for every WG. Maybe 
I should have.

However, speaking personally, for some reason I'm not too enthusiastic 
about writing charters in drafts. Perhaps this is just resistance to a 
change, but I have found it personally easy to deal with the charters 
simply as text. Writing charters as drafts would in my opinion 
complicate the process. I couldn't write a proposed charter version NN 
for a BOF in the two weeks before an IETF meeting. And often the 
different versions are written by different people, e.g., original 
proponents, then selected BOF chairs, then ADs. Some of these people 
would probably take it longer to set up the necessary tools and submit 
the draft than it would take from them to send an e-mail with text. And 
not all versions of charter proposals represent actually agreed 
charters. Typically even a simple recharter event would go through 2-3 
iterations.

But I do have an alternate proposal, if its important for the IETF 
community to understand the differences and rationales of charter 
changes better. Why don't we simply change the announcement format to 
include the three parts that I outlined above? My understanding is that 
the process is largely manual from the secretariat's point of view, so 
all it would take is for the AD to include three pieces of information 
instead of one when requesting a charter review to be sent out. In most 
cases this information exists already, its just a matter of sending it 
out to the public as well as the IESG.

Jari

---

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 15:38:34 -0400

Hi, John and Jari,

Either suggestion you guys made would be a step in the right direction.

And just to be clear, I have no intention of touching the 
increasing-WG-charter-formality tarbaby (US reference, details at 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarbaby) - "how many bar BoFs do I have to have 
before I can request a BoF?" being a spectacular example of this genre.

My only desire is to provide better certainty that (for example) when Robert 
asks me if I'm OK with "the proposed SIP-CLF charter", we both have the same 
understanding of what that means.

Thanks,

Spencer

> rationale behind a particular change. Right now the public charter review 
> process rarely does that. For contrast, when I recharter a working group I 
> usually send a message to IESG, IAB, and few of our directorates. The 
> message contains:
>
> - explanation of what has happened in the real world or IETF to justify a 
> change
> - the new charter text
> - a diff (I simply run rfcdiff on the old and new texts and attach a .html 
> file, or put it on my website)
>
> from the end result what the rationale or the difference was. This is made 
> even harder by some formatting and HTML issues that one would typically 
> encounter when trying to look at the IETF web charter and another version 
> in an e-mail. I think an improvement here would be useful. I think there's 
> been a few times when I have posted a separate e-mail explaining the 
> rationale and changes, as a reply to the ietf-announce mail. But I 
> certainly have not done it for every WG. Maybe I should have.
>
> simply as text. Writing charters as drafts would in my opinion complicate 
> the process. I couldn't write a proposed charter version NN for a BOF in 
> the two weeks before an IETF meeting. And often the different versions are 
> written by different people, e.g., original proponents, then selected BOF 
> chairs, then ADs. Some of these people would probably take it longer to 
> set up the necessary tools and submit the draft than it would take from 
> them to send an e-mail with text. And not all versions of charter 
> proposals represent actually agreed charters. Typically even a simple 
> recharter event would go through 2-3 iterations.
>
> community to understand the differences and rationales of charter changes 
> better. Why don't we simply change the announcement format to include the 
> three parts that I outlined above? My understanding is that the process is 
> largely manual from the secretariat's point of view, so all it would take 
> is for the AD to include three pieces of information instead of one when 
> requesting a charter review to be sent out. In most cases this information 
> exists already, its just a matter of sending it out to the public as well 
> as the IESG.
>
> Jari
>

---

From: Thomas Narten <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 22:15:10 -0400

Vint,

> we are so close to the finish line that I don't think it is worth the  
> time and potential controversy to revise the charter beyond giving  
> flexibility on the mapping matter.

I will certainly defer to the chairs and ADs in this particular
case.

My bigger concern is the meta issue of recharters in general, and how
the current method of just posting the new charter with no context or
explanation seems a poor way of doing things, especially if the goal
is to get meaningful community feedback. I'll followup on that on the
separate thread that has since started.

Thomas

---

From: Thomas Narten <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 22:33:38 -0400

Jari,

I think you are on the right track. I have appreciated the notes you
send out with recharter messages explaining your thinking and the
purpose of the recharter.

> include the three parts that I outlined above?

I'd strongly encourage the IESG to consider doing this for the formal
announcement. I think it would be a worthwhile improvement, and as you
say, the information should already be available. So it shouldn't
really be a lot of additional work.

Thomas

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 09:18:41 -0400

--On Wednesday, August 19, 2009 22:26 +0300 Jari Arkko
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>... 
> However, speaking personally, for some reason I'm not too
> enthusiastic about writing charters in drafts. Perhaps this is
> just resistance to a change, but I have found it personally
> easy to deal with the charters simply as text. Writing
> charters as drafts would in my opinion complicate the process.
> I couldn't write a proposed charter version NN for a BOF in
> the two weeks before an IETF meeting. And often the different
> versions are written by different people, e.g., original
> proponents, then selected BOF chairs, then ADs. Some of these
> people would probably take it longer to set up the necessary
> tools and submit the draft than it would take from them to
> send an e-mail with text. And not all versions of charter
> proposals represent actually agreed charters. Typically even a
> simple recharter event would go through 2-3 iterations.

Jari,  

I'm not convinced that the I-D idea is a good one, only that it
was worth thinking about.  

As I read through your comments above, I can see how to easily
work around them with a few tools and reminding ourselves that
the "real" requirements for format and content of I-Ds that are
not expected to evolve into RFCs are quite few.   As a handy
example, the IESG could decide that documents named
"draft-charter-foo-..." were exempt from the posting deadline so
that there would be no backout period.   That would presumably
require some programming in the submission tool, but, given that
it already contains code to differentiate between
"draft-ietf-..." documents and others and between "-00"
documents and others, I can't imagine it would be more than a
handful of lines or code.

That still doesn't make the idea a good one.  Your note and the
other cases, definitely illustrates that my suggestion was just
that and not a fully-baked proposal (I already knew that).

At the same time, one of the elements of Spencer's note to which
I was reacting is that, with many versions of a charter floating
around, being able to look quickly at two or more of them and
determine quickly and accurately which one is "latest".  So it
seems to me that it is important that whatever is done be
associated with an unambiguous version number or time stamp.
The sequence numbers on I-Ds accomplish that (and leave tracks)
but there are obviously many other ways to do it.

> But I do have an alternate proposal, if its important for the
> IETF community to understand the differences and rationales of
> charter changes better. Why don't we simply change the
> announcement format to include the three parts that I outlined
> above? My understanding is that the process is largely manual
> from the secretariat's point of view, so all it would take is
> for the AD to include three pieces of information instead of
> one when requesting a charter review to be sent out. In most
> cases this information exists already, its just a matter of
> sending it out to the public as well as the IESG.

It think it is important for the community to understand that.
Otherwise, posting charters that are being revised (as distinct
from new ones) is, in general, pretty useless, perhaps even a
demonstration of how easy it is to go through the forms of
community review without making that functional for anyone but
the most determined.  

The expanded announcement you suggest would work for me.  I
think Spencer and I were focused on a slightly earlier part of
the process, in which multiple drafts were circulating around in
the pre-BOF and immediate post-BOF stages.  Those are drafts
that people closely involved with the group in formation need to
see and interact with (and that probably would benefit from
being a little more organized and easier to identify).  Once the
time comes for a formal AD announcement of a charter draft to be
reviewed for the community, I think your suggestion would be
more than adequate.  

The question of comparing a formally-proposed charter revision
with an existing charter is a somewhat different one.  As I
write this, I even suspect that they may be two separate
problems that could be solved in different ways.

best,
     john

---

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:13:37 -0400

John was actually channeling me accurately in his note - and I wanted to 
agree that what Jari proposed (when sending charter proposals out for 
review) is worth doing, and is almost certainly solving a different problem 
than tracking different versions of charters - so please consider what Jari 
proposed, no matter what else gets considered...

Spencer

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:14:50 -0400

On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 09:18:41AM -0400, John C Klensin wrote:

> being a little more organized and easier to identify).

The above suggests a way forward, then, involving nearly zero work on
anyone's part.  When a potential WG is in the nascent stages, someone
who thought this a good idea could use the I-D approach as an
experiment (probably requiring posting late versions to the target
mailing list, due to the dark period before meetings; the sequential
numbering would still hold).  If people reported positive experience,
then the strategy could be adapted.  

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]
Shinkuro, Inc.

---

From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:18:36 -0700

>flexibility on the mapping matter.

Fully agree. But I think you misread Thomas' message. He asked for clarity on what the differences between the current charter and the proposed new charter are. He pointed out that the proposed new charter has some obvious time and document count errors in it, but he didn't insist that those be changed. (I note that probably the majority of WG charters have such errors in them at any given time.)

To answer Thomas' question: the diff is in the last bit part of the charter.

Current:
The assumptions outlined above are considered critical to the WG
constituted by this charter.  The WG will stop work and recommend that
a new charter be generated if it concludes that any of the following are
necessary to meet its goals:
. . .
   (iii) A change to the basic approach taken in the design team
documents (Namely: independence from Unicode version and elimination of
character mapping in the protocol)

Proposed:
. . .
  (iii) A change to the basic approach taken in the design team
documents (Namely: independence from Unicode version and reduction of
dependency on character mapping )

---

From: Vint Cerf <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 15:17:06 -0400

Thomas,

The notion of including a non-normative mapping document was very late  
in the process and the charter just gives the WG the latitude to  
include what it agreed in wanted to include in the work.

any charter written 18 months ago is bound to be somewhat out of date,  
especially the target milestones. You may blame the chairman for  
failing to achieve them but I don't think we need to revise them now  
as they would be purely historical given the current last call about  
to expire in a couple of days (unless someone actually asks for  
extension).

Speaking of which, no one has actually requested an extension of the  
original 24 August deadline so I am going to close comments on the  
Last Call at end of the day on the 24th unless I hear differently from  
the WG participants.

Vint

---

From: "David Harrington" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2009 09:17:53 -0400

Hi,

Personally, I would like to see deltas kept for updated charters,
especially the milestone information, so we can go back and find out
how timely a WG has achieved its completed objectives. 

When I try to determine whether participating in a WG seems justified,
one thing I want to know is whether that WG if effective. Not being
able to see when a milestone was supposed to be completed versus when
it was completed makes that harder to determine. And when a re-charter
causes the old milestones to disappear, we are throwing away useful
information.

dbh

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On 
> Behalf Of Spencer Dawkins
> Sent: Wednesday, August 19, 2009 1:40 PM
> To: [email-masked]
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Subject: meta-issues on charter discussions (was: Re: WG 
> Review: Recharter ofInternationalized Domain Names 
> inApplications, Revised (idnabis))
> 
> Dear IESG,
> 
> published deltas 

> thrashing where 
> there) after

---

From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:33:40 +0300

David,

> causes the old milestones to disappear, we are throwing away useful

I agree. And the view into old charter versions and old WGs is pretty 
bad as it stands now. Or maybe I'm missing some directory somewhere 
where all this information is nicely available. I have some tools that 
track recharter events*, and constructing them was a pain. And now that 
pain is coming again, because the web site reorg broke my html-parsers :-(

Anyway, if you want to see milestone information as well, then that's 
yet another different problem from the pure charter changes. Milestones 
get changed regularly through chairs and ADs reviewing current estimates 
for work, completing work items, new ways to split work into drafts, 
etc. If a milestone now says December 2009, it might have said something 
different a month ago and the entire milestone might not have existed 
when the most recent rechartering operation was performed.

Jari

* 
http://www.arkko.com/tools/admeasurements/stat/chartering-activity.html and
http://www.arkko.com/tools/admeasurements/stat/chartering_6.html

---

From: Thomas Narten <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2009 10:41:37 -0400

Re: old charters and such.

While poking around earlier this week, I found:

      http://www.ietf.org/dyn/wg/charter/history/

(it is hanging of the WG pages, so not that hard to find.)

It appears to be a snapshot of charters whenever they change. But,
they "change" often due to events that are probably not the kind of
changes we are thinking about, and there is no indication about what
has changed, so there are a lot of copies and wading through them to
find stuff appears pretty daunting. And the history only goes back 3
years or so...

But they might be a basis for some tools to extract stuff. But, if
tools are going to do this, it seems like an archival format other
than HTML would be desirable.

Thomas

---

From: Tony Hansen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2009 10:57:08 -0400

This was posted to the ietf list.

While the charter history pages are nice, they can be made better using 
a format similar to how tools.ietf.org presents RFCs and I-Ds: a 
non-printing list of versions at the top with ways to show differences 
between versions.

Sounds like a job for the tools team. :-)

	Tony Hansen
	[email-masked]

---

From: Dave CROCKER <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 09:24:46 -0700

+1

-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net

---

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Aug 2009 09:47:14 -0500

This was one of the more attractive parts of the suggestion to use IDs for 
charter revisions. If we don't use IDs for charter revisions, I'd like to 
see similar functionality provided for the approach that IS chosen...

(so, if you're reading this on tools-discuss, this is probably an 
opportunity to weigh in on the IETF list about whether you're willing to 
develop this functionality :-)

Spencer

> While the charter history pages are nice, they can be made better using a 
> format similar to how tools.ietf.org presents RFCs and I-Ds: a

---

From: Lisa Dusseault <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Aug 2009 18:35:14 -0400

You can probably blame my vacation as well as process defaults for some
confusion... I was already in Canada last week when we had the telechat
where the IESG approved sending out the 1-line diff proposed for the
charter, and I didn't take the time or stretch the process so that the
charter discussion announcement had the contex for the change (or just the
diff which was in some ways clearer).

Since the IETF community seriously discussed the issue of mappings when the
charter was first approved, I personally felt it was important to fix that
publicly before the WG completed its work on a path that might not have been
expected.

If there is energy to fix the charter in other ways right now I would help,
but I have not seen that energy given the understandable focus on the rest
of the work.

Lisa

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2009 09:55:52 +0200

The tools WG pages used to have diffs between charter versions
(see e.g. http://tools.ietf.org/wg/tls/charters/ -- the "delta"
symbol leads to side-by-side diff between the versions), but 
it looks like this broke when new www.ietf.org was deployed
in July.... 

Best regards,
Pasi

> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of
> ext Tony Hansen
> Sent: 21 August, 2009 17:57
> To: [email-masked]
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: meta-issues on charter discussions
>

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2009 18:11:48 +0200

Hi Tony, Pasi,

> it looks like this broke when new www.ietf.org was deployed

Ouch.  Mmm.  I'll see if I can fix this.

	Henrik

> Tools-discuss mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tools-discuss
>

---

From: Richard Barnes <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:15:38 -0400

As a side issue, it appears that Ekr is chairing TLS twice, at least
according to the linked TLS tools page.
--Richard

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:23:32 +0200

> according to the linked TLS tools page.

Yah.  That's something the secretariat will have to fix in the metadata
for the WG; the tools page just uses the info which is in the database.

Best,

	Henrik

---

From: "Michel Py" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:28:58 -0700

Hi fellow IETFers,

Can someone from sun.com (preferably in a managerial position) contact
me in private please? I have a non-technical question not worth more
bandwidth on the list.

Thanks
Michel.