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

Eric Rescorla ekr at rtfm.com
Mon Jun 9 08:36:29 CEST 2003


Scott W Brim <swb at employees.org> writes:

> On Sun, Jun 08, 2003 06:36:17PM -0700, Eric Rescorla allegedly wrote:
> > Consider the following thought experiment: take all the documents that
> > come before the IESG in a year. Rank them in terms of quality.  Then
> > plot quality against "time to approve". Ask what the correlation is.
> > If there's not a high correlation, why would you expect people to
> > produce high quality work?
> 
> Perhaps, but only if you consider the starting point. 
That's what I meant.

> Documents which
> take the longest in getting through the IESG can have poor quality to
> start with, and still aren't great when they get out but at least
> they're tolerable.  What you could look for in your experiment is the
> change in quality between when the document is sent to the IESG and when
> it emerges, versus time.
That depends on what you're trying to measure. For the purposes of
this discussion I'm not trying to measure IESG value-add but rather
the extent to which having a good document makes it clear faster
(since that's the incentive for the WG to do a better doc). For
that question, the starting document quality is what you want.

-Ekr


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


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