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

[Keith Moore]

> >it was obvious to me when I was on IESG that the organization we had
> >in place was unscalable.
> 
> Can you elaborate on the ways in which you found the
> organization to be unscalable?

I sometimes like to say that we're living the Tower of Babel problem.

The bigger the Internet gets, the greater the number of competing
interests there will be that don't understand each other, don't speak
the same language, and need to be reconciled.  You can't do this
in narrowly-focused working groups because they cannot see the forest
for the trees.  You can't do this in IESG because that's too much burden
to place on one small group, and it takes a lot of effort for anyone
(much less someone so burdened) to bridge these gaps and understand how
to resolve the conflicts.  And when we fail to resolve the conflicts and
leave it to the marketplace, something bad generally happens - which
tends to mean increased costs and complexity and decreased reliability
and flexibility.  Which ends up making more work for us later on.

Frankly I'm not sure there's any structure to handle this that can
really be called scalable. I suspect we can do better than we're doing,
but it's not easy.  For instance, having each area provide a set of
shepherds to advise working groups seems like a good idea, but I'm not
sure how much it will help with cross-area conflicts.

Keith