Guidelines for review - the General Area Review Team (GEN-ART)

These are the preliminary (April 2004) draft guidelines for late review in the GEN-ART.

See also: Reviewer list, Reviews, Review at Last call

They focus on the model that has proved fairly productive in the Ops Directorate: Quick review close to telechat time, to advise the AD on issues that remain serious.

Timeline of review

Review is either done at Last Call, when the document appears on the IESG agenda, or both.

The process for reviewing documents at Last Call:

The process for reviewing documents when they appear on the IESG agenda:

The telechats are every other Thursday - 2004 dates (as of this writing) are April 15, April 29, May 13, May 27, June 10, June 24, July 8, July 22, August 5, August 19, Sept 2, Sept 16, Sept 30, Oct 14, Oct 28, and (NOTE IRREGULARITY) Nov 18, Dec 2 and Dec 16.

Except for skipping a telechat around the IETF meetings, these rarely change.

Form of review

Rather than invent new guidelines, this document steals liberally from draft-carpenter-solutions-sirs-01, and adapts for the special "late, quick review" case and the General area's questions.

Each review must start with a summary statement chosen from or adapted from the following list:

The length of a review will vary greatly according to circumstances, and it is acceptable for purely editorial comments to be sent privately if it's obvious that the document will have to be substantially revised anyway. All substantive comments must be included in the public review. Wherever possible, they should be written as suggestions for improvement rather than as simple criticism. Explicit references to prior work and prior IETF discussion should be given.

Reviewers should review for all kinds of problems, from basic architectural or security issues, Internet-wide impact, technical nits, problems of form and format (such as IANA Considerations or incorrect references),and editorial issues. Since these reviews are on documents that are supposed to be finished, the review should consider "no issue too small" - but cover the whole range from the general architectural level to the editorial level.

The review should apply generally agreed IETF criteria, such as

as well as any other applicable architectural or procedural documents. It is important that reviews give precise references to such criteria when relevant.

Of special interest to the GEN area (because it's no area's special interest) is:

Archiving of reviews

All reviews will be archived and publicly visible. The archive is here.