working group commitment

[Ted Hardie]

I've been thinking about this a bit, and I'm wondering whether
the fairly obvious differences in approach reflect a different
understanding of what a volunteer organization is like.  I've
heavily snipped the stuff below to focus on what caused
me to ask that question.

(Heavily snipped to focus on one point)
On Wednesday, March 26, 2003, at 12:27 PM, Dave Crocker wrote:

> Ted,
>
> TH> 2) How do you ensure timely review by the wg in the face of the
> TH> "someone else will do it" problem?
>
> Simply require it.
>
> If it is not done, the group is terminated. Hence, let the group figure
> out how it wants to satisfy the requirement.
>
> TH> 3) How do you manage the working group as energy fades (typical 
> for many
> TH> IETF wgs)
> Terminate the working group.


This seems to me to imply two things.  First, it seems to implythat 
there is
no objective benefit to the work being completed.  I've been involved 
in wgs
where the work energy faded almost to nothing as the process ran to 
completion,
but the output did get used and re-used.   No doubt some other solution
would have been found had those working groups died, but it would have
been slower and the results almost certainly would have been narrower
in scope.  Though that is my subjective assessment of the result, I 
suspect
an objective assessment would be that we are often better off in some
measure by having work complete than by having it killed off.

Second, it seems to imply a management structure that has the 
community's
blessing to apply a major stick.  In a volunteer organization, there are
often difficulties in setting deadlines and deliverables.  Here, we get 
buy
in to those deliverables and milestones both by the working group and
the larger community in the charter process.

If a group decided to evaluate itself by its charter and stop when it 
didn't
meet the charter, I think we would agree  that the working
group was empowered to take that decision.  If we decide that some
part of the management structure is empowered to hold the working
group to the charter (as the expression of the community's expectation
of deliverables and deadlines), then I think we run right back into
the problem I started with:  who is it, exactly, that we are holding
to this deadline and deliverables?   The doc authors and chairs
are the well-known stuckees, but they may well be doing their
work even when a working group is in a problematic state for
review or general energy.  Killing a group in that case runs
the serious risk of losing the volunteer energy of folks doing
work, as they have had their work stopped based on the lack
of interest of others *without any way to identify who those others 
are*.
Not only does this look like we're not supporting those who are
doing work, it may be difficult for them to identify who *ought* to
have done something, so they can help solicit that work or energy.


. If energy fades, folks have lost interest.  If they have lost 
interest,
> then community pull has gone away.
>
> So the deeper question is how to avoid having energy fade? The obvious
> answer is to move more quickly.
>
> (And, yes, any nascent psychologist will note that the other lever to
> the energy mechanism is to feed the group periodic rewards, by virtue 
> of
> the group perceiving itself as having successes.)

I agree with both of these.  I note, though, that giving responsibility 
is
one of the periodic rewards (as a message that the community trusts 
you).
I think the SIR proposal and the stuckee proposal help partly because 
they
offer opportunities for participants to get responsibility acknowledged 
by
the community.  Whether that turns up on a resume or just gives a warm
feeling to the parties involved, I think it is a good thing.  We have 
few
carrots to offer at this moment, and recognizing folks for work is about
the only one we can commonly put our hands on.  Using it more in this
(or these two) cases may help us, and I think it's worth a try.
					regards,
							Ted Hardie