A ceiling on the number of working groups

[John C Klensin]

Hi.

Mike O'Dell and I have been exchanging notes about our
perceptions of problems with the IESG and IETF more generally.
A  quick summary of our conclusion is that many of the issues
come back to an insufficient level of leadership and focused
management from the IESG.  From that perspective, discussions of
enforcement of guidelines (or not), WG duration and deliverable
limits (or not), etc., are about symptoms.  Such things might
fall out if more IESG time were focused on WGs throughout their
lifecycles, but the main issue becomes whether the IESG can be
given the resources, the community backing, and the bandwidth
to, as others have commented, really start exerting both
leadership and management.  The bandwidth part of that is
particularly important because the community keeps seeing
reports and symptoms that the IESG members can't do as good a
job as they would like of interacting with WGs because there
just isn't enough time.

We have just sent an I-D draft off for posting that addresses
these issues.  It will presumably be posted in the next few days.

As a preview for those of you who want one, or who don't want to
slog through the details of a long draft (I assembled the text,
not Mike :-( ) our conclusion is that a ceiling on the number of
WGs in an area would provide most of the advantages of the PACT
suggestions, while putting more responsibility on the IESG to
get serious and lead and manage.  We are proposing a 25%
reduction in the number of WGs in the IETF, applied on an area
by area basis.  

The devil in such proposals is, of course, in the details, and
the I-D provides the details, but the general notion is to
reduce the workload to some approximation of manageability and
to force the IESG and the community to explicitly face the
problem that each additional WG imposes costs.

The abstract from the I-D is:

	One of the key proposals in the PACT [PACT] draft is a
	limit on the duration of Working Groups.  The authors
	believe that limitations of that type are too
	constraining on IESG ability to manage working groups
	and areas and that they will not be effective in
	practice.  We propose an alternate restriction -- on the
	total number of working groups in an Area -- that we
	believe will have a number of desirable effects (a
	superset of those suggested with the PACT model) and
	that it is more likely to operate as intended.

regards,
   john