time-to-approve etc. [Re: Trusting the IESG to manage the reform process (was:Re:Doingthe Right Things?)]

Pekka Savola pekkas at netcore.fi
Mon Jun 9 16:06:50 CEST 2003


On 8 Jun 2003, Eric Rescorla wrote:
> 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?
[...]
> 
> 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.

It might be interesting to note a few more fine-grained metrics for 
determining the document quality, e.g.:

 - the number of DISCUSS votes raised in the IESG
   * and how soon after raising the DISCUSSes a new document is published 
which addresses those issues (ie. the time it's not an IESG issue)
 - documents which were approved as-is, but an RFC editor note was added 
by the IESG (causing some delay)

FWIW, I have personal experience for authoring or commenting a few 
documents which have been through the IESG, a few notes:
 - one document has been pending a revised version from the author for 
over 6 months (the author knows the ball is at his feet)
 - one document for which comments were given took about a month for even 
the authors to reply
 - one document has been pending Expert Review by WG for about a year

So, my perception is that the most time-consuming thing after submission
to the IESG appears to be resolving issues raised by IESG; I hope nobody 
sees this delay as a problem of IESG :-).

To conclude, I guess adding *real-time* transparency ("where does this 
document stand?  where is the ball for the document ie. who's in charge 
at the moment? "do I have any documents I should take action on?") is 
crucial (I-D tracker helps but may not be enough). 

-- 
Pekka Savola                 "You each name yourselves king, yet the
Netcore Oy                    kingdom bleeds."
Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings



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