RE: PROTO Process

["Mary Barnes" <mary.barnes at nortel.com>]

Andrew, 

We have tried something similar to the approach you mention in the
SIPPING WG over the past 3 years - i.e., publishing deadlines for
document reviews and subsequent updates post review, etc. (within the
WG).   In the end, one of the problems we commonly encountered was
authors not having enough cycles to do the updates in a timely manner
(at least within the WG).  The WGLC and IESG target timeframes that we
were publishing kept having to expand (i.e., originally we had thought 2
weeks was reasonable to get an update post review, but in the end that
got to be more like 8 weeks) and it was quite rare that a document was
ready in what one would consider a reasonable timeframe.  However, I do
think that our requirement of ensuring that we had 3 to 4 people doing
very detailed reviews of the documents did improve the overall quality
and the changes for the majority of the documents once they left the WG
were generally handled in a fairly timely manner (although, there are
some documents that have languished - both due to lack of author cycles
and some IESG concerns over the solution approach).  We also had
multiple types of reviews - "Initial WG reviews", "pre-WGLC", "WGLC"
(sometimes multiple), "post-WGLC" as a document was progressed to try to
get as much feedback as possible earlier in the process.

As others have suggested, however, even a process like this doesn't
really keep folks from coming in at the last minute and disagreeing with
the work item. But, it did seem to help in getting these concerns in a
bit earlier rather than later.   

We did cross area and cross WG reviews (within RAI) for documents as
appropriate before they left the WGs, which I think also helps with
resolving some of the potential IESG type concerns earlier.   

I would be concerned about trying to take this sort of process IETF wide
(i.e., announcing doc deadlines for WG documents) due to the amount of
noise.   I think such announcements are certainly appropriate at the WG
level and maybe the area level.  But, I honestly have a hard enough time
just catching the documents published for the WGs that I chair, have
deliverables in and participate in. I've actually given up on documents
for some of the WGs that I participate in and now just rely on the tools
page to keep track of the relevant documents. One suggestion would be
for WG chairs to use the "Comments/issues" field on the tools page to
publish the internal WG deadlines. It seems that only a few chairs are
even taking advantage of that field right now.  That would make it
easier as right now, you often have to backtrack through WG minutes to
find out where a doc is internally in the WG. 

Regards,
Mary   

-----Original Message-----
From: wgchairs-bounces at ietf.org [mailto:wgchairs-bounces at ietf.org] On
Behalf Of Andrew Sullivan
Sent: Thursday, May 14, 2009 12:46 PM
To: Fred Baker
Cc: wgchairs at ietf.org
Subject: Re: PROTO Process

.....

All of that sends me back to the problem of getting documents from WGs
that are almost always ready for publication, so that IETF- and
IESG-period changes become the exception rather than the rule.  I wonder
whether there might in fact be a procedural change we can make.

Would better scheduling of document flow from WGs be helpful?  If we had
clear, author/editor-generated dates at which things are projected to be
ready, then we could announce IETF-wide "Document _n_ will be available
on $date, and it deals with {$topic1..$topic_t_}."  Would such
announcements do anything more for review than the current RFC Editor
postings on the arrival of new I-Ds?

Note that none of the above is to suggest automatically that things like
two-week guidelines are obviously bad.  But if 80% of documents coming
from WGs really do need to be fixed on their way through to publication,
no amount of tinkering will cure that bad illness.  We need to address
the basic problem.

A

--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at shinkuro.com
Shinkuro, Inc.