General Area open meeting - Friday 14 July 2006 Notes by Scott Bradner, lightly edited by Brian Carpenter I - Welcome, and introduction (Brian Carpenter) (fumble with projector for 3 min) Brian Carpenter introduced the session and said that the session would be run like a sequence of mini-BOFs. He said that he would ask for a feeling of consensus from the room at the end of each segment to see if the work should proceed. II - IESG structure and charter. (John Leslie) John Leslie reviewed the history of the current IESG charter, published as RFC 3710, and the changes in the duties of the IESG since then including those defined by RFCs 3683 and 3933. He also noted the creation of the IASA and its impact on IESG work. He proposed a new document describing the roles, but not procedures, of the IESG. He proposed a design team approach with discussion being held on an open mailing list and Internet Drafts published after review by the IESG. The design team would be committed to respond to questions of clarity but not be required to change the draft based on IESG members opinions of better process. John proposed that the design team consist of former IESG members and other members of the community. Brian Carpenter asked if the exclusion of current IESG members was on purpose. John Leslie said it was. John Leslie the reviewed his proposed deliverables and asked for discussion. Spencer Dawkins asked if the tasks included in the new document would include those tasks delegated to others. John said that it was the opinion of the team that suggestions for delegation would be included. Margaret Wasserman suggested that the document should just urge delegation of tasks in general but not call out specific tasks to be delegated. She also asked for clarification of the processes John suggested. John Leslie made it clear that a document would be changed in response to community input after it was published as an Internet Draft - he said that his note about changes related to the IESG review before being published as an ID. Margaret Wasserman said that she was concerned about the exclusion of active IESG members from the design team - John Leslie said that the composition of a design team would be up to Brian Carpenter . Brian Carpenter said that he had not yet decided. Thomas Narten also suggested that current IESG members be included. A short discussion confirmed that the IESG would in any case be consulted and that normal IETF consensus procedures apply. Elwyn Davies asked how the procedures listed in RFC 3710 would be preserved so that there would not be a procedural vacuum? Brian Carpenter said that there were other activities under way to document the procedures. Spencer Dawkins said that care should be taken with the charge (or charter) to avoid future confusion. Leslie Daigle reminded the group that the output of a design team was not treated in some special way in that it was treated just like the input of any individual so that we should not worry a great deal about the makeup of the design team. John Leslie asked for a hum for those who though that this was a useful effort. The humming in the room indicated that there was consensus that it was. Responding to a request John Klensin said that he felt that the effort should not be undertaken at this time since he feels that the community is burnt out. He suggested that it could be revisited in the future. Margaret Wasserman said that she had not seen anything that indicated that we have a problem that needs to be fixed. Thomas Narten sais that we need to focus on identifying a problem first. Lucy Lynch said that there was a lot in flux and that some people were already overloaded. Leslie Daigle pointed out the difference between the design team and working group approaches. She echoed Margaret Wasserman to say that we do not have a clear problem statement. But she felt that it would be useful to go ahead and see what comes of it. Scott Brim echoed this opinion. John Leslie noted that there was no reason to assume that we had to do all of his proposed deliverables, he said that the effort could stop Spencer Dawkins said that he worried about the fact that the community is not dealing with the problems presented in the report of the problem working group. Thomas Narten noted that people have gotten frustrated when activities are started but not finished. John Klensin worried about the image that is being presented to the outside world of the IETF fumbling around with its process documents. He said that he has 3 particular worries: first, the community is burnt out about process efforts and that tends to mean that few people are involved; second, because people have voted with their feet to not be involved we need to give these issues a rest (also thinking of giving the IASA more to do before it has stabilized is a bad idea; and third, John worries that a design team formally chartered by an AD might feel that it has some special authority, something that John feels happened with TechSpec and Pesci. He also said that continuous tweaking with IETF process risked people outside the IETF to think that the IETF was self-destructing and thus ripe for picking. Brian Carpenter asked if people were willing to work on this issue. A few people indicated their willingness. He said that he would take the results of the mini-BOF into consideration and decide what, if anything, he was going to do. III - WG Procedures. (Margaret Wasserman) Margaret reviewed RFC 2418. She noted that some parts of the document are outdated and that RFC 3934 (mailing list management) updated RFC 2418. She noted that RFC 2418 contains more procedures (for example what email address to send things to) than might be good. She noted that improvements such as some of the new tools impact some details of RFC 2418. Lucy Lynch noted that Dave Meyer created a good document on WG agenda creation etc but that the document is now expired. Margaret Wasserman noted that such documents were compatible with RFC 2418. Margaret Wasserman then discussed two possible approaches to updating RFC 2418. She said that the approaches were to produce an incremental update to RFC 2418 or to produce a complete overhaul. She said that the team suggested running a survey to figure out what a rewrite would need to be worked on. She noted that a 3rd option was to do nothing. She also reported on the discussions within the team on what a survey would include. Margaret presented a set of discussion questions: 1/ does RFC 2418 need substantial changes if so is a survey a good idea if so what kind of survey 2/ are incremental updates to rf 2418 needed? if so, what type if so, what venue 3/ volunteers? Spencer Dawkins said that he felt that it would be good to do an incremental update on RFC 2418. He said that he has been giving the working group training and that some of the information from that training would be good to add. Thomas Narten said that identifying problems in working groups would be good but that running a survey might be more work than warranted. He said incremental updates of this type of document are a good thing. He suggested focusing on specific problems and solving those problems rather than focusing on revising RFC 2418. John Leslie suggested that making RFC 2418 small and contain only things that will be stable and put the rest onto web pages. Scott Brim said that he feels that a survey would be a good idea to make sure that we hear from more than the usual voices. Robert Sparks agreed that a survey is important. He said that it was important to be careful on what should be put on web pages and what not. Scott Bradner said that it was important that the rules themselves need to recorded in permanent documents not web pages. Olaf Kolkman said that what he needs is to know what he can and cannot do. He said that a survey might be a good way to get some information but that advice on how to run a working group could be better done on a living wiki. Aaron Falk wanted to be sure that people understood that rules, procedures and advice need to be teased apart. Margaret asked if people felt that a survey would be useful - few people expressed an opinion and the support was split about evenly. John Klensin noted that doing good surveys can be very hard. Margaret Wasserman asked if people felt that creating an increment update to RFC 2418 was a useful thing to do. Eight or so people supported the idea and no one objected. (This was out of 40 to 50 people in the room.) She then asked if there were people were willing to do some work. A few of people indicated that they were willing. Aaron Falk suggested that a concrete proposal be created then we can figure out how to proceed. Spencer Dawkins suggested that some questions (in a survey) could be usefully asked. IV - Mailing list management procedures. (Jim Galvin) draft-galvin-maillists-00 Jim Galvin reviewed discussions held by team of volunteers about mailing list principles. He said that the team felt that the management of IETF lists should be consistent. (See presentation for the other principles) Scott Bradner noted that it would be a good idea to have actual rules that might impact the ability of individuals to participate in the standards process be recorded in written documents. Jim then asked for discussion. Brian Carpenter noted the current document does not address non-working group lists and should. He asked about the "closed working group lists" mentioned in the draft - Brian said that he did not think that any "working group" list could be closed. He said that he found the idea of a separate group to worry about suspending working group posting rights a good idea because it could lead to a farer process. He asked why the IESG should be in the appeals chain? Jim Galvin said that it seemed to be the right way. David Black asked why the document even discussed closed mailing lists? He asked what parts of this document would apply to, for example, design team mailing lists. He said that he did not want to make the creation and running of design teams any harder. Elwyn Davies noted that there might be other lists (e.g., IAB or IASA) lists that might need to be addressed. Scott Bradner suggested that this document only focus on public IETF lists and not address the non-public lists. Lucy Lynch suggested that the best path might be two separate documents -- one dealing with mailing list operations (e.g. archiving etc) and one dealing with processes such as terminating posting privileges. Jim Galvin asked if people felt that this was a useful effort to undertake and if the current document was a good basis for the work. There was some support and no opposition. John Klensin noted his previous caution about process exhaustion and his worry that any such rules must actually have demonstrated strong community support. Scott Bradner supported this view. Margaret said that she felt that a separate mailing list would not properly involve the community. Joel Halpern noted that it is actually hard to determine if a proposal has clear and strong consensus. John Klensin said he would like to propose an experiment wherein someone posts a short ID to move RFC 3683 to historic as a clear and present danger. This would remove an existing problem. Margaret Wasserman noted Joel Halpern's worry and said that we still needed to try to gage consensus. Spencer Dawkins noted that there have been and are many process related mailing lists -- too many to follow. John Klensin suggested that someone monitor process lists and produce a weekly summary of the process lists for community. This could raise community knowledge and maybe interest in the process work. V - Any other business, draft status Brian Carpenter reviewed the status of the following IDs. draft-alvestrand-ipod Harald is on vacation & no update draft-klensin-norm-ref ready to go but not yet gone draft-narten-iana-considerations-rfc2434bis still being worked on, hard to finish because of continued suggestions draft-narten-successful-bof good document, may progress draft-carpenter-ietf-disputes Brian's tweak to appeals process but he has not seen an upwelling of support for the document so it may die draft-carpenter-protocol-extensions derived from the Bradner/Narden expired draft - tells other SDOs how to update IETF technology Greg Daly asked the status of draft-narten-successful-bof. Brian said Thomas Narten would welcome input. Margaret Wasserman noted that the draft has been used by the Internet Area. Brian Carpenter suggested that it could be web-based advice. Greg Daly said that he thought that it would be good to publish the ID as an informational RFC. 11:23 end