Re-revised idea for early cross-area review

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

Hi,

Coming back to an old discussion with a new spin (a dispatcher):

As you know,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.

The overhead of asking for every draft to be reviewed at an early
stage by every Area would be enormous and often pointless. Thus,
the best option appears to be generalist reviews at an early stage.
We have some experience now with generalist reviews at a late stage,
through the Gen-ART team that Harald set up, and we know that
it can work reasonably well with a team of reviewers and someone
to act as "dispatcher."

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

- 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

- NEW: we appoint a volunteer dispatcher, who will assign drafts to reviewers
  on a round-robin basis, to ensure that each draft gets at least one review

- reviewers will send their generalist reviews to the early-reviews list
  for archiving, and to the WG concerned

- WGs are expected to treat these generalist reviews seriously, especially
  when they indicate serious cross-area problems or gaps. But their formal
  place in the IETF process is the same as any other comments

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