Trusting the IESG to manage the reform process (was:Re:Doingthe Right Things?)

[Eric Rescorla]

Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> writes:

> > The point I'm trying to make (and tried to make in SF) was that
> > it seems to me that a rather small part of the variation in how
> > long a document takes to clear the IESG is the quality of the
> > document (whatever that means).
> 
> and what substantiates that perception?
Well, there's people's personal experience, of course, but as we all
know, the plural of anecdote is not data.

As I noted at the time, the variance of time-to-approve is quite
large, even for documents that are approved by the IETF as-is. That's
not completely inconsistent with document quality, but if the
documents that are taking a long time to clear (>100 days) are really
that low quality, it's somewhat surprising that they aren't sent back
for revision.

Do I have any totally convincing evidence? No. It's just my intuition,
combined with the lack of strong evidence to the contrary.  However,
to the extent to which people believe that the quality effect is small
then there's no incentive to quality, regardless of whether it's in
fact true. I of course can't speak for what other people believe,
though I imagine that that would be relatively easy to discover without
too much complicated analyiss.

Really, 
-Ekr

-- 
[Eric Rescorla                                   ekr at rtfm.com]
                http://www.rtfm.com/