RE: [IAB] Out of the box proposal

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

We have discussed doing the reviews earlier in Gen-ART for the same
reason that folks don't want IESG comments so late -  some folks don't
like some of the Gen-ART comments arriving at IETF-LC time. And, Gen-ART
did move their initial reviews earlier as originally they were only done
when a doc got on the telechat agenda.  The problem we have with moving
the reviews any earlier than IETF-LC is that there is no automatic
trigger to assign the documents - the onus would have to be on the WG
chairs (or relevant AD) to ask for an "early review", which we have done
in the past and that works just fine.   But, triggering that
automatically would be problematic and inefficient in my opinion as many
documents go through WGLC multiple times in the WGs in which I've been
involved. And, the number of review cycles would increase for each
reviewer. So, it does come back to a resource issue - we would need a
whole lot more Gen-ART reviewers, for example, for this to work
effectively. And, folks that have the bandwidth for this volunteer
activity are difficult to come by these days. I had no luck in
recruiting one of the RFC errata enthusiasts to review documents BEFORE
they're published as RFCs. To me this re-enforces that some folks just
really seem to enjoy finding errors in other people's work ;)

Regards,
Mary. 

-----Original Message-----
From: wgchairs-bounces at ietf.org [mailto:wgchairs-bounces at ietf.org] On
Behalf Of Adrian Farrel
Sent: Friday, May 15, 2009 3:27 PM
To: Working Group Chairs
Subject: Re: [IAB] Out of the box proposal

> If we really think the problem is 80% of the documents are not ready 
> for IESG submission when the WG thinks it is, and if 80% of those 
> documents have "classic" bugs, I would offer we do the (gasp) ITU-T 
> thing and hire 3-4 full-time, PAID (i.e., IETF/IAD/ISOC staff) experts

> to review submissions before they get to the IESG.

I am not clear why you suggest this is an ITU-T thing.

The ITU-T do, indeed, have an editorial staff. They operate on documents
after they have received the equivalent of IETF last call (that is
consent at a plenary meeting). This is pretty much the equivalent of the
RFC Editor.

It seems that you are proposing an earlier pass by a professional staff.

Sounds expensive, but maybe the authors/WGs would be willing to see this
happen to speed up their documents.

I wonder whether there is a volunteer staff who could do this. After
all, we have several area directorates (including GenArt) who review
documents, and we have several enthusiasts who like to look at RFCs and
raise errata.

Adrian