Longer or more meetings?

[Jari Arkko]

Eric, Marshall,

A part of your argument appears to be which property is more important:
timeliness, quality, commercial success, or something else. I guess
the right answer is that we need some amount of all of these properties.

But that is trivial. Instead, I'd like to draw your attention to the
fact that everyone is arguing this case as if we had a zero-sum game.
Faster results implies lower quality etc. I don't know about you others
but I have a feeling that there is some room for improvement without
necessarily making other aspects suffer. Before we start a foodfight
on whose favorite property gets thrown out of the window, why don't
we spend some time on true improvements?

Making people aware of how they are doing in terms of their goals is
normally used for boosting productivity, not getting them fired or
their WGs shut down... and we need to know better how we are doing
and not just in terms of "we are not done yet". Early input from the
IESG and IAB will save *their* time when they don't have to complain,
discuss, and defend their position later. Version control tools could
help authors and RFC editor to reduce the amount of time they spend
figuring out changes. Base protocols that concentrate only on key
features get through the faster. Interim meetings and teleconferences
increase amount of work but don't take away anyone's possibility for
list discussion or main meeting participation. Etc.

I'm not saying that there are no hard tradeoffs to make, but the
current discussion appears as if the only possibility to cut down
RFC production times is cutting back on quality. I don't believe
this is the case.

Jari