Re: PROTO Process

[Lisa Dusseault <lisa.dusseault at gmail.com>]

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 10:45 AM, Andrew Sullivan <ajs at shinkuro.com> wrote:


> The first is that the documents really are getting to the IESG in need
> of additional work -- sometimes because the WG didn't tackle document
> clarity issues (Fred suggested one such case yesterday), sometimes
> because of inter-WG issues (like Peter mentioned), or sometimes
> because WG review was just not good enough (as Fred suggests above).
> In this case, I have doubts that additional process rules will help.

Agreed.  To be blunt, my fellow ADs, past and present, are exceptional
reviewers,
aware of dozens of pitfalls with IANA process, various registry peculiarities,
reference issues, conflicting work, and most notably, experts in recognizing
when a statement is ambiguous even if the authors and even WG reviewers
automatically fill in the missing pieces.  Many of these are entered as
DISCUSS issues so that the AD who found the issue can confirm in
telechat time if their understanding is correct.  Some of these issues could be
re-entered as COMMENT but our tools encourage us to keep a DISCUSS
so that the AD who is sponsoring the document gets a reminder to check
that an issue really is cleared up.


> The third is that almost all of the delay is due to the process,
> because people aren't responding fast enough.  Given the number of
> documents that actually do get changed, however, it seems possible
> that any delays that are just from slow response times are themselves
> attributable to the number of documents that need to be changed: a
> single person can only process so much, and the volume might simply be
> too great if 80% of them really do need work.

A lot of time is spent waiting for authors to make decisions or revisions.
Explicit author wait states account for an average of over 50 days delay!
In addition, some states like "AD Followup" include time passing while
authors or WG chairs respond and decide what to do.

My personal attitude towards this is that authors are volunteers who have
to pull together a few hours now and then in the interstices between a
full-time job commitment and the rest of their lives.  So if it takes three
months to get a document revision, so be it.  My time, on the other hand,
is committed to being an AD for at least some hours every week.  I make
sure every month that there are no documents that are waiting on my
next action, once identified that doc goes to the top of my priority queue.

I mention this because your wording of "single person" might be read as
the AD being the bottleneck, having at any time a dozen documents with
DISCUSS raised, and a dozen documents on which that AD has raised a
DISCUSS.  My experience is that's not the bottleneck -- communication
and editing wait-states are, and the bottleneck there is the difficulty of
making decision among 3 to 10 people (authors and chairs and shepherds)
with many other things to do.  I certainly can't complain about fellow
ADs being
unresponsive to clearing their DISCUSS (or updating it) when presented
with information and because it's their job I'm happy to be aggressive
bugging them until they do respond.

> Would better scheduling of document flow from WGs be helpful?

I don't think so.  I would much rather get docs from WGs as soon as
they're ready.  Most WG documents spend longer in the WG than in
processing after pub-request so this would be a bad fix anyway.

> 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.
>

Do we want less review from the IESG?  As many have pointed out,
it might be better to get Proposed Standards out faster and fix them
up in the Draft stage.  Currently our tools and processes are structured
to do more careful content review for PS docs, than to do any other
part of our work.  We must read nearly every PS proposal
because our vote processes require a minimum number of ADs to
pass a PS, and even "No Objection" implies that we've reviewed
the document and agree it passes muster.

I must be becoming a cynical "old" AD because I dislike much of our
processes and biases but see little to no hope in changing them in
ways that truly matter.  And sorry if jetlag is contributing to the
cynicism and bluntness!

Lisa