A 100.000 foot perspective on "what is the problem"

[Pete Resnick]

OK, so now I've seen it twice and I think it's worth responding to. 
Both Randy and Ran responded to Bob's comment:

>the IESG needs to be more aggressive in terms of steering the 
>efforts of the IETF

with similar statements:

At 9:16 AM -0800 12/14/02, Randy Bush wrote:
>the problem is that we get a bi-modal message, yours and the "leave 
>us alone and just rubber-stamp our documents and pass them to the 
>rfc editor."

On 12/16/02 at 1:31 PM -0500, RJ Atkinson wrote:
>	At least some folks' postings here seem to indicate that some 
>folks think the IESG is currently too aggressive in steering the 
>efforts of IETF...
>
>	My own personal view is that there might be a bi-modal 
>distribution within the IETF membership, with one peak around the 
>"less IAB/IESG interference, less process, faster to RFC" 
>school-of-thought and another peak around the "more IAB advice, more 
>IESG leadership, only publish really high quality RFCs", with a 
>significant multi-dimensional continuum between those two peaks.  So 
>I have a hard time figuring out where the community's "rough 
>consensus" position lies (and am glad that I'm not the stuckee for 
>puzzling out where the IETF should go next).

I think both of you are setting this up as two contradictory and 
mutually exclusive choices. I don't think they are. One of the clear 
messages you are hearing is "No surprises LATE IN THE PROCESS". I 
think most folks would be happy with more IESG input if it happened 
during protocol development. What I think gets people's knickers in a 
twist (as James has mentioned) is that in most instances, the only 
significant input a WG gets from the IESG is at the end of its 
lifetime. Making course corrections during the process due to IESG 
input is much less disruptive and can be easily incorporated into the 
work. If WGs were getting that kind of input all along, Last Call and 
IESG review *would* be a rubber stamp for all intents and purposes: 
Except for the "Holy crap! How could we have missed that?!?" 
occurrences (which will occasionally happen), most of the issues 
would have been addressed by the WG during development.

I think you could get consensus for, "The IESG needs to be more 
aggressive in terms of steering IETF efforts *during the work* AND 
the final IESG review of documents should be almost a rubber stamp 
(save everyone dropping the ball) *at the end of the work*".

Two caveats:

1. If it weren't taking WGs 2 years to get product out the door, the 
red flags at the end of the process wouldn't seem so painful. The 
IESG could probably get away with doing mostly end-game review 
without as much complaining if WGs were producing documents in 3 to 6 
months.

2. Doing cross-area review all along the way would be a HUGE 
undertaking for the IESG at this point, especially considering their 
current workload. I think eventually the during-the-process work 
would lessen the backend load, but it would be no picnic at the 
get-go.

So, all that said, I think "The IESG isn't agressive enough in terms 
of steering AND the IESG won't leave us alone and just rubber stamp 
our documents and pass them to the RFC Editor" isn't a completely 
unreasonable description of a problem. (We are supposed to be 
describing problems here, aren't we? ;-))
-- 
Pete Resnick <mailto:presnick@qualcomm.com>
QUALCOMM Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102