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

[Eric Rescorla]

Eric Rescorla <ekr at rtfm.com> writes:
> 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.
It's come to my attention that this could probably have been
phrased a little more diplomatically. 

Here's how I see it:
Documents are a long time in production.  By the time they reach the
IESG there's a lot of inertia behind them, especially if they've
already been implemented by a fair chunk of people. This fact,
combined with the fact that the IESG only has a limited amount of
time, makes it difficult for the IESG to either say "no, we're not
taking this" or to do real major surgery.

Now, it's true that the IESG does this occasionally, but there are
also a lot of documents that make it out of IESG review which could be
a lot better. Moreover, it's often not very clear to the WGs which
documents will get pushback and which won't.

In my view, WGs are primarily motivated by the desire to get documents
published. As long as WGs perceive that a lot of effort working on
the documents doesn't materially increase their chance of publication,
their incentive to spend a lot of time producing good documents
is relatively low.

-Ekr