Subject: [newtrk] An ISD example - MIXER

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2004 12:29:21 +0100

Since the two examples so far (IETF procedures and SMTP) have been 
"important" standards, I thought I'd try out the process of writing an 
"uninteresting" ISD for an obscure technology - which nonetheless is 
somewhat complicated to sort through.

I took John Klensin's ISD for SMTP, tore out the content, and put in some 
new stuff.
The result is attached. It's a pure hack - no XML, just ASCII. And all the 
section numbers are broken. But it's got content.

Time used:

- Approx 20 min for the initial outline and deciding what to include, and 
making a first draft
- Approx 20 min of reading comments from various people on the first draft
- Approx 20 min for cut'n'paste from the various announcements nad 
abstracts (and deciding what to include for docs that don't have an 
abstract)
So I now have running code that it's possible to produce a 
not-totally-unreasonable ISD for a fairly complex technolgy in an hour of 
editor's time.

Worthwhile use of time?
And - does the ISD look sensible/readable to you all?

                  Harald

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From: Margaret Wasserman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2004 07:37:42 -0500

Hi Harald,

At 12:29 PM +0100 11/23/04, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
>Time used:
>
>- Approx 20 min for the initial outline and deciding what to 
>include, and making a first draft
>not-totally-unreasonable ISD for a fairly complex technolgy in an 
>hour of editor's time.

All you've proven to me is that it isn't possible to produce an 
initial draft of an ISD in less than an hour...

You have far superior resources to produce this ISD than the average 
person who might be asked to write one, as you already have 
searchable archives of all of the IETF document announcements and 
abstracts and specially-constructed tools to deal with them.  Did you 
use your own archives when you created this ISD?  Or did you hold 
yourself to using the unsearchable web archives provided by the IETF?

Also, how much longer would it have taken to produce this in XML with 
proper formatting and section numbering?

And how much work do you think it would take to gain WG consensus, AD 
approval and IESG approval for an ISD?

Maybe you are just better at this than I am, but I would 
realistically say that I spent ~15-20 hours of my life producing RFC 
3934 "Updates to RFC 2418 Regarding the Management of IETF Mailing 
Lists", and the entire document contains less than two pages of 
non-boilerplate text!!

The contents of RFC 3934 were not contentious, there were some 
editorial and clarification changes based on e-mail discussion of the 
first draft, the document was presented at one IETF meeting, the 
responsible AD (you) passed it to the IESG without comment, there was 
one Discuss and a few Comments from the IESG that resulted in an RFC 
editor note.  One mistake was introduced during RFC Editor processing 
which was corrected in AUTH48.

There were two revisions of this draft published on 3-Jun-04 and 
17-Jun-04.  The draft was in the IESG (inlcuding a 4-week IETF LC) 
from 3-May-04 to 26-July-04, and it was published as an RFC on 
4-Nov-04.

So, in my mind the absolute minimum effort needed to publish any IETF 
consensus document is ~15-20 hours of work over an elapsed time of at 
least  5 months.  Do you think otherwise?

Margaret

.
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From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2004 14:15:19 +0100

--On tirsdag, november 23, 2004 07:37:42 -0500 Margaret Wasserman 
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>> - Approx 20 min of reading comments from various people on the first
>> draft - Approx 20 min for cut'n'paste from the various announcements nad
> All you've proven to me is that it isn't possible to produce an initial
> draft of an ISD in less than an hour...
>
> person who might be asked to write one, as you already have searchable
> archives of all of the IETF document announcements and abstracts and
> specially-constructed tools to deal with them.  Did you use your own
> archives when you created this ISD?  Or did you hold yourself to using
> the unsearchable web archives provided by the IETF?

Actually I found the protocol announcement using Google, and fished the 
abstracts out of my flat-file RFC repository.... not so fancy...

> proper formatting and section numbering?

Probably about the same, given a reasonable template to start from.

> approval and IESG approval for an ISD?

That is the question....

> Maybe you are just better at this than I am, but I would realistically
> say that I spent ~15-20 hours of my life producing RFC 3934 "Updates to
> RFC 2418 Regarding the Management of IETF Mailing Lists", and the entire
> document contains less than two pages of non-boilerplate text!!
>
> The contents of RFC 3934 were not contentious, there were some editorial
> and clarification changes based on e-mail discussion of the first draft,
> the document was presented at one IETF meeting, the responsible AD (you)
> passed it to the IESG without comment, there was one Discuss and a few
> Comments from the IESG that resulted in an RFC editor note.  One mistake
> was introduced during RFC Editor processing which was corrected in AUTH48.
>
> 17-Jun-04.  The draft was in the IESG (inlcuding a 4-week IETF LC) from
> 3-May-04 to 26-July-04, and it was published as an RFC on 4-Nov-04.
>

This is one reason why I don't want to produce ISDs as RFCs or through the 
RFC process..... 3.5 of those 5 months were spent waiting for the RFC to 
pop out.

                      Harald

.

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From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2004 08:27:34 -0500

--On Tuesday, 23 November, 2004 07:37 -0500 Margaret Wasserman
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>...
> So, in my mind the absolute minimum effort needed to publish
> any IETF consensus document is ~15-20 hours of work over an
> elapsed time of at least  5 months.  Do you think otherwise?

Margaret,

If you are right, even about non-controversial documents, we
might as well throw in the towel because:

	* That is far too long, in calendar time even more than
	in work time. For the uncontroversial ones, it causes
	unfavorable comparisons to standards bodies and other
	groups we have traditionally denounced as slow.
	
	* If we don't do this sort of work --either in this form
	or in the form of Applicability Statements (which,
	traditionally, have taken more time and been even harder
	to mobilize)-- then, as John Loughney and others have
	eloquently pointed out, those who are trying to adopt
	and use our standards often have no idea what they
	should actually require or implement (and sometimes, or
	often, get it wrong).

So, instead of attacking the only plausible proposal that we
have on the table, do you have an alternate suggestion?   I hope
it is not the status quo.

regards,
     john

.

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From: Margaret Wasserman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2004 08:36:18 -0500

Hi Harald,

At 2:15 PM +0100 11/23/04, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
>This is one reason why I don't want to produce ISDs as RFCs or 
>through the RFC process..... 3.5 of those 5 months were spent 
>waiting for the RFC to pop out.

I agree that finding a way to post approved ISDs without 3-1/2 months 
of RFC Editor time is important.  In  fact, I think we should find a 
way to publish all of our approved documents much faster than that. 
I have some ideas about how to re-order the IETF document 
editing/approval process to accomplish that, but I'm not sure that 
this is the right place to discuss them.  Is it?

Removing the RFC editor time wouldn't have substantially cut-down on 
the amount of effort I spent on producing RFC 3934, though.  Do you 
really think it is possible to produce a document that reflects IETF 
consensus and receives IESG approval with less than ~15-20 hours of 
work from the author, plus at least that much work from the 
reviewers/IESG/etc?

Most of the work I did to produce 3934 involved making sure that the 
appropriate people were aware of the document and that their feedback 
was reflected in the final version...  Surely we don't want to 
publish ISDs without some sort of consensus/approval process?

I don't consider this level of effort to be a blocking problem for 
ISDs.  I just think that if you want to make any calculations 
regarding the cost/benefit tradeoffs, it would be more realistic to 
estimate a minimum of 15 hours of author/editor time plus a similar 
amount of WG/IESG time per ISD than it would be to estimate a minimum 
of 1 hour of author/editor time.

Margaret
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