Danger to the Net? (Re: My thoughts about the problems of the IETF)

John C Klensin john-ietf at jck.com
Mon Apr 21 21:48:09 CEST 2003



--On Monday, 21 April, 2003 17:13 -0700 Fred Baker 
<fred at cisco.com> wrote:

> At 06:30 PM 4/21/2003 -0400, Steve Silverman wrote:
>> If less than 7 people have read and really understand an ID,
>> there is a good chance, that there
>> are significant undetected problems that may result in an AD
>> blockage or problems down the road.
>
> That suggests a procedural step: any working group that sends
> a document to the IESG should perhaps have a requirement to
> identify 7 people that read it.
>
> I'm not generally much for idiocy tests of that sort, but in
> this case one wonders...

Fred,

I don't know if seven is the right number, but I have believed 
for some time that many steps in the approval process would be 
improved if the submission process from a WG to the IESG 
included a checklist document that, in turn, included

	* An explicit statement from the WG chair that the WG
	had reviewed the document and reached meaningful
	consensus.
	
	* Checkoff statements (one at a time) that the required
	sections were present or explanations as to why they
	were not required.
	
	* Explicit signoff from several participants in the WG
	that they had read the document, verified it against the
	checkoff statements, and were of the opinion that the
	document was technically competent, an adequate
	definition, complete, and represented WG rough
	consensus.

That "several" could reasonably be your "seven".  And the notion 
would be that, if the responsible AD, or the IESG, detected 
document problems that this process should have identified and 
didn't, we would have a list of names that could be held up for 
public ridicule and as responsible for any ensuing delays.

Pretty hard-nosed, but there really is no excuse for asking an 
AD to spend time reviewing WG output that has long-required 
sections missing, that is not intelligible, or that no one has 
really read.

      john



More information about the Problem-statement mailing list