Killing old/slow groups - transition thinking

[Pete Resnick]

Hi, my name is Pete, and I'm an overdue WG chair.

Seriously, though, since two of my working groups appear on Harald's list:

>OSPF FTPEXT IFMIB RIP VRRP MANET TN3270E PIM ISIS MSDP DNSOP DHC 
>PPPEXT SMIME IPCDN MBONED DNSEXT RMT IPSRA SYSLOG IMAPEXT MOBILEIP 
>MPLS KRB-WG WEBDAV ITRACE ACAP CALSCH ATOMMIB LDUP TSVWG CCAMP APEX 
>IMPP OPENPGP TLS MSEC STIME L2TPEXT SEAMOBY BMWG IPV6 MAGMA PILC 
>MALLOC ZEROCONF EOS PRIM MULTI6 IPSEC TEWG FAX

(my two are IMAPEXT and APEX), I thought it might be nice for me to 
say something about this. As Marshall said:

>at least one of these is in the "waiting for the IESG to publish our 
>I-Ds so we can disband" state

That's APEX. The other one is IMAPEXT. In both cases, *I would have 
loved it if the IESG had come along and threatened shutdown on both 
of these!*

IMAPEXT was the first WG I ever chaired. I've learned a great deal 
about how NOT to chair a group from the experience. It would have 
given me a heck of a lot more leverage to push the WG to completion 
if I had a serious IESG threat of shutdown behind me. Instead, I 
tried to be too laissez-faire with the group and let them come to 
consensus without pushing. Now I've got a very tired WG that's having 
a hard time completing its work. I will take a great deal of the 
blame for not managing the WG properly from the get-go (I know now 
that I was perfectly within my rights as chair to make my own 
threats, with or without the IESG on my tail), but it would have been 
nice as a first-time chair to have a stick in the form of a deadline. 
I should have at the very least been able to say, "If you all don't 
finish this document by the end of the month, we're going to have to 
re-negotiate our charter and we could be shut down."

(One answer, BTW, to Randy's recent question about why things need to 
get done in a timely fashion, is because groups that don't get things 
done quickly get old, tired, and stop producing anything of quality. 
It takes a gargantuan effort to produce good documents when a WG is 
worn out and/or apathetic because they've not been making forward 
progress.)

APEX has been sitting in a wait state on one document for some period 
of time now. Personally, in this case I would have liked an 
auto-shutdown procedure, because I would have come to consensus with 
the IESG about how to get this document un-stuck much more quickly. 
With some great efforts by two ADs, it looks like I now do have a 
path out. My guess is that things would have moved faster without 
extra intervention of those ADs if a deadline had generated an 
interrupt.

I've now become an ornery bastard as a chair and concentrate on 
getting the job done (as I think folks in my WGs now can attest), but 
I do think it would have been quite helpful to have real threats in 
my pocket as a new chair.

pr
-- 
Pete Resnick <mailto:presnick@qualcomm.com>
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