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

[Keith Moore]

> Some people are comfortable with the idea that all substantive
> decisions rest with the IESG (with the possibility of appeal to
> the IAB).

If I understand what you are saying, I don't know anybody who believes
that.   Certainly IESG cannot make all substantive decisions.   Major
design decisions and minor details have to be worked out by working
groups and/or document authors.

At the same time, there is a need for oversight.  Somebody needs to
sanity-check a WG's output.  Somebody needs to make sure that WGs don't
break existing standards, or things that are already deployed, and to
make sure that the outputs of various WGs play well with each other.
Sometimes that involves saying "this design decision causes problems,
and this work won't be approved until those problems are fixed".

I would have been happy if that's the most that I had to do when I was
an AD.  But sometimes WGs that were told that a particular design
decision caused problems were not able to figure out how to do things
another way - sometimes because they lacked expertise; sometimes because
they lacked imagination or were locked in to a particular mindset.  So I
often found it necessary to say "I suggest you do things this way" or
even "here is some text I think would work".  Which greatly increased my
workload, but at least some of the time it got the document out the door
faster.  And when I told working groups "here are the constraints; it's
your job to work out the details of how to solve the problem given that
set of constraints"  too often they could not do so, and would insist
that I solve the problem for them.

But I generally view IESG's role as one of saying when things are good
or when they are bad, and perhaps suggesting design decisions, but not
dictating them.

> Instead, I think that we need to find ways to push (or pull?)
> authority (including substantive decision making) out to a
> larger group. 

I can't imagine how this could possibly work well.  

The group with ultimate approval authority needs to be kept small in
order to function well.  IESG is already as large as it can stand to be.
Now if you would like to see another group to provide advice and
expertise to working groups, and relieve IESG of that burden - that
might be worth considering.  

But maybe it's worth asking the question:

Why aren't WGs doing due diligence?

and 

If WG's don't do due diligence, how can we expect that another review
body between the WG and IESG is going to do any better?

Keith