suggestions

[Dean Willis]

> >          P11: If a wg chair or AD is an author of a wg doc, he should
> >          find a co-author and have his co-author make presentations.
> >
> Problem: <not sure how to formulate this

I think the suggestion is that chairs who actually participate in the
work may give the appearance of a conflict of interest. 

There is a tradition in other bodies that chairs act completely as
impartial facilitators driven entirely by group consensus. They are
often not even expected to have technical understanding of the groups
task. The groups are general driven either by absolute consensus, or by
a strict delegation/voting mechanism. Note that "document editors" in
these groups have a basically stenographic task. They are not expected
to make substantive contribution to the text during editing. Instead,
seperate written "contributions" are made by members of the WG that the
editor simply integrates into the previously approved text.

This is somewhat different from the IETF tradition, which often uses the
principal champion of a specific work item as the chair of the WG or
design team. Here, chairs are not just managers, but architects. They
are expected to be intimately familiar with the technical aspects of the
work, with the Internet architecture, the expectations of the IAB and
IESG, and so on. Similarly, our documents are generally authored by the
people doing most of the thinking on the topic of the document, and
external input is generally gathered informally.

I suspect that this is the "tip of the cultural iceberg" that
differentiates IETF from other organizations. Further discsussion may
help us either understand the differences and problems that arise when
people with conflicting world-models try to work in IETF, lead us toward
changing our working model, 

It relates to question of "are listed authors AUTHORS, SUPPORTERS, or
EDITORS of a document". We aren't usually clear on a lot of things, such
as the question of whether a specific document is really the work of a
WG, or is the work of an individual or design team that has perhaps been
technically reviewed and critiqued by a WG. This of course factors into
the question of long-lived broadly scoped working groups vs. short-lived
task-focused working groups.

I believe it is worth really understanding the difference and cultural
expectations here, as I suspect a lot of what makes the IETF a special
and fun place to work as opposed to ITU/ETSI type organizations, which I
personally find produce acutely painful work environments. Perhaps we
should do our work just like these other organizations do -- but we
really MUST understand what we're talking about.

--
dean