General comment on draft-ietf-problem-statement-00.txt

[Brian E Carpenter]

Keith Moore wrote:
> 
> > >- due to IESG workload and breadth of IETF's scope, most documents are only
> > >reviewed in detail by one or two IESG members anyway, so objections from
> > >one or two members necessiarly carry more weight than it would otherwise
> > >seem.
> >
> > Well, this is a straightforward statement of the workload problem.
> > You're saying that the IESG is so overworked that finding a problem
> > in a document is rather lucky: Only a couple of IESG members will be
> > reviewing it anyway, so if they happen to be the ones that have the
> > expertise to find problems, we ought be glad they caught it.
> 
> This is not quite what I was saying.  IMHO, having one or two people review a
> document in depth, as a back-up for thorough WG and last-call review, is
> more-or-less sufficient.  At the same time, when I was on IESG it was not
> unusual to get a document which clearly had not benefited from sufficient
> review at any level - either in the WG or in last call - and in this case the
> ADs reviewing the document bore almost the sole burden of doing review and
> recommending changes to make the document adequate for IETF blessing.   And
> that's clearly too much burden to place on one or two people.
> 
> But it would be a huge stretch to infer from this the problem could be solved
> by diluting IESG authority.

Aren't we basically saying that the problem is:

  Too high a proportion of the documents considered by the IESG
  contain serious problems, detected very late in the review process.

So, the IESG is doing its job (detecting and kicking back faulty
documents) but it doesn't scale because too many of them require
too much attention.

Another problem statement is

  Document quality control early in the WG process allows too high
  a proportion of documents to proceed with serious problems.

       Brian