Discipline of Internet Protocol Engineering

[john.loughney at nokia.com]

Just a short reply to myself - I forgot to add that one of the difficulties
of creating a charter is that, often, you think you know what you want
to accomplish it, but sometimes it is difficult to seperate from what from 
the how and the why.

Thinking about this a bit more, maybe we need to have more formal guidelines
on what a charter should contain.

John

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ext [mailto:john.loughney at nokia.com]
> Sent: 04 June, 2003 09:31
> To: dcrocker at brandenburg.com; moore at cs.utk.edu
> Cc: problem-statement at alvestrand.no
> Subject: RE: Discipline of Internet Protocol Engineering
> 
> 
> Hi Dave & Keith,
> 
> > KM> The reason I say this is that several groups have 
> demonstrated the inability
> > KM> to define the problem they are working on,
> > 
> > Unfortunately, i think this problem is deeper than we might wish to
> > acknowledge.  I tend to be a charter fascist, on the theory that a
> > crystal clear charter will leave no doubt about the problem being
> > solved, and/or the benefit to be derived from the result and the
> > deliverables to be produced.
> > 
> > I view charters as real contracts, making clear what is included and
> > obligated and what is excluded and prohibited.
> > 
> > However with great regularity, remarkably fuzzy charters are getting
> > approved. since chartering involves lots of experienced 
> people beyond
> > the working group, we can't simply assess the problem on the working
> > group folk.
> > 
> > I don't know how to improve this.  But, yes, we definitely 
> > need to keep trying.
> 
> I would say that there is a breakdown in the chartering 
> process.  I would
> think, for example, inviting the proposed WG chairs to the 
> conference call
> when the charter is discussed could help, for example.  As a 
> novice chair,
> creating a charter is difficult. Better advice & engagement 
> from the IAB/IESG
> would be helpful.  For experienced WG chairs, there can be a 
> tendancy that
> many of the IAB/IESG seem to be more lenient with their 
> proprosed charters 
> because the experienced chair is a known quantity, so the 
> thought is that
> they know what they are doing.
> 
> John
>