Revised idea for early cross-area review

[Brian E Carpenter <brc at zurich.ibm.com>]

Hi,

I'm afraid this has been pending for several months. Here's
a revised proposal following the list discussion in May.

The IESG is concerned to ensure that documents are reviewed for
possible cross-area issues as early as possible, before they
are in final IESG review. This is to avoid "late surprises"
where serious cross-area problems are found after a WG has
completed its work on a draft. On the other hand we don't want
to add bureaucracy or steps in the process, so this kind of review
needs to be done in parallel.

Ideally, such reviews should be solicited from specific reviewers.
But that creates extra work to find such reviewers when they're
needed. The logical moment to solicit early cross-area review
is when a WG formally adopts a draft as a WG item (i.e. the draft
is added to the WG charter page). At that point, the draft is
one that is by definition on its way through the process.

We'd like your comments on a way to achieve this.  The thought
is not to add any new process step or hurdle for the WGs.  It may add a
a bit of additional, but integral, work responding to any reviews
that are sent.  In outline (with details to be decided),

- a new list, perhaps early-reviews at ietf.org, will be created. Anybody
  can join it, but joining it is understood to indicate willingness
  to carry out early reviews.

- the list membership is made visible, at least to all WG Chairs

- whenever a WG formally adopts a draft as a WG item (i.e. the draft
  is added to the WG charter page), the secretariat will generate a
  message to the early-reviews list, saying something like

    The FOOBAR WG has adopted draft-ietf-foobar-XXX-00.txt as a WG draft
    and solicits cross-area review. Comments should follow the guidelines
    at <URL> and should be sent to foobar at ietf.org within four weeks

- the WG chair(s) will also specifically solicit reviews from one or two
  members of the early-reviews list, at their discretion. They will specify
  particular areas of concern if appropriate. (It's worth noting the obvious:
  the absence of early reviews doesn't imply that there are no cross-area
  issues.)

- if you think the general idea is good, we'll solicit your inputs for
  the early review guidelines, on the foundations of the work done by the
  former ICAR WG.

(It was also commented that we need a tool to support reviews and
comment tracking - agreed, but it's a separate issue.)

     Brian