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

Eric Rescorla ekr at rtfm.com
Mon Mar 3 17:40:46 CET 2003


Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> writes:

> > It's important to separate the notion of "ultimate" authority
> > from the notion of direct authority. Just because the IESG is
> > ultimately responsible for getting the right decision made
> > (in the buck stops here sense) doesn't mean that the IESG has
> > to be directly involved in every individual decision.
> 
> indeed.  so how do we get wgs to produce production-quality output
> and get production-quality ietf last call review?

No doubt this is considered a heretical statement in IETF, but I don't
believe in production quality ietf last call review.  When you ask a
large group to do something without picking out any particular
individual, noone has any particular incentive to volunteer. Instead,
what you get is that a few people who really care about any particular
issue will put in some effort and the rest will do nothing--which is
pretty much what we have.

As for getting WGs to produce production quality output, I think
that's rather more complicated. At the least, I think people have
to have the impression that there is an incentive to actually
do so. I'm not convinced that at the moment document quality
is a particularly important factor in whether the IESG passes
a document.

-Ekr






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