Subject: IAOC Minutes

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:48:32 -0400

IAOC,

I appreciate the effort to bring the minutes up to date and note
that there are now documents posted as minutes through 2 and 16
July.

However, inspection of those documents shows some things that
seem worth calling to your, and the community's, attention.

The purpose of posting minutes is presumably to satisfy the
requirements of BCP 101 relative to open and transparent
operation and keeping the community informed.  Yet both of these
documents seem to contain a great many statements of the form of 

	"The Committee discussed the fact that..."
	
Some fairly typical examples drawn from those July minutes are:

	"The Committee discussed the outcome of the recent trip
	to Asia."
	"The Committee discussed the topics and status of the
	presentation to the Board of Trustees."
	"Ray recommended that the Committee proceed to approve
	the contact move from 2010 to 2012 pending further
	negotiations and a review of the terms and conditions."

Similarly, from the 18 June documents, the first four items
(avoiding quoting out of context) were as follows, with my
comments interspersed with "#":

> 0. Minutes
> 
>    - 23 April, 2009
>    - 7 May, 2009
> 
> The Committee did not review or approve the minutes set forth
> on the agenda.

# Any reason for not providing a reason?  That material
# cannot be confidential.

> 1. AMS Proposal 
> 
> The Committee discussed the AMS proposal.

# I assume that the details of that discussion are
# confidential.  However, the community is entitled to
# know "proposal about what".  Normal conventions for
# minutes would suggest that you identify the subject of
# the proposal and then explicitly indicate that the
# discussion was taken off the public record because of
# contract negotiation confidentiality.   I believe that
# BCP 101 requires making that distinction.

> 2. RFC Editor Update 
> 
> The Committee discussed the status of the RFC Editor update
> and the next steps.

# This is presumably a reference to the RFC Editor Model
# document, but it is impossible to know that from the
# minute entry.  More important, that is a very public 
# document, with discussions on a public list, postings
# of drafts as I-Ds, etc.  It appear to me that there is
# no possible reason for the IAOC to have had a 
# confidential discussion on the subject, so the minutes 
# should show what the discussion was actually about and
# what conclusions, if any, were reached.   Or, if 
# something was confidential, that should be explained.

> 3. Meetings Update 
> 
> The Committee discussed the status of several upcoming IETF
> meetings.

# And?

While the kind of information that is being provided may be
useful as short-term memory aids for the IAOC members, knowing
what topics were discussed does not provide the community any
useful information, especially when those discussions are
mentioned without context.  For example, what is going on with
the last item mentioned above?  Is "contact move" something that
we are expected to understand or a typographical error that was
not caught during your review process?  For the first item,
"trip to Asia" by whom, with what purpose, and what was "the
outcome".

The documents are also abbreviation- and acronym-laden in ways
that may be adequate for the IAOC's own reading but that tend to
obscure information from the community.   I'd recommend that the
RFC Editor's guidelines about abbreviations and acronyms be
followed unless someone wants to devise a more targeted policy.

For example, in the 16 July document, item 2 is "RFC Publisher"
while item 4 is "RPC Proposals".   I assume "RPC" is the RFC
Production Center", but I don't believe I should have to guess.

Posting documents in a format that involves text files with very
long lines that require horizontal scrolling with many systems
is not a favor to the community or an aid to ready
comprehensibility.

I also note that there are significant gaps in the record: no
documents for August or September 2008, missing meetings in
October 2008, November 2008, and February 2009.   So the fact
that there are documents posted for last month (even if those
documents were adequate minutes) would not indicate that the
record is now roughly up-to-date.

I suggest to the IAOC and the community that these documents, at
least based on the sample of the most recent three of them, are
not "minutes" as that term is usually understood but simply
slightly-annotated agendas, modified to show what topics were
actually addressed.   There may be a trend here; if so, it is
not good -- I sampled documents from April 2009 and October 2008
and they seem to represent a somewhat more serious effort to
inform the reader about what was going on in the discussions.

regards,
   john