Stringency (RE: 12 problems)

[Margaret Wasserman]

>Unfortunately the stats in the ID-tracker haven't been around long enough 
>to make sensible trend lines.
>A few years back, Henning Schultzerinne made scripts chewing through the 
>Internet Monthly Report (http://www.ietf.org/IMR/) to generate stats on 
>the time between -00 version publication, IETF-wide Last Call and RFC 
>publication - that's the source of the frequently quoted statistic that 
>"time has gone from 6 months to 2 years".

Unfortunately, this won't measure whether IESG stringency is a problem,
or even fully capture whether document are or are not spending more time
in the IESG.

The WG submits a document to the responsible AD, who reviews the document.
This process can take months, particularly if the AD find significant
issues with the document, but this all happens *before* the document is
submitted to the full IESG, and before an IETF-wide last call is issued.

Statistics on the length of time between WG last call and IETF last call
might be interesting, as it does seem like some documents stay in this
state for a long time.  But it would be hard to decide whether the "blame"
for documents that linger in this state would lie with the responsible
AD (for being too slow, too stringent, etc.) or with the document editors
(for slow document turn-around times to address AD comments).

Margaret