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

[Jari Arkko]

Keith Moore wrote:

> I also think interim meetings can be a good thing.  However I have seen one WG
> that did essentially *all* of its work at interim meetings - with essentially
> none on the mailing list, and none at normal IETF meetings (at which only a
> few of the WG regulars would show up).  Those interim meetings were
> deliberately chosen to favor a particular group of participants.  And this was
> a group that desperately needed clues from elsewhere within IETF - protocol
> design expertise, for instance.
> 
> I don't mention this as on objection to interim meetings, but only to point
> out that there is a potential downside.  Interim meetings can be good ways to
> reach closure, but they can also be effective means of excluding input.
> 
> Also, unlike some of the other problems I've been citing, this is an extreme
> case - I've only known of one WG to do things this way.

I wouldn't worry too much about such extreme cases -- not with
interim meetings or other forms work within the IETF. ADs,
chairs, editors, and so on all need to be given some tools
and freedom to work with them. And either the community or
the "supervisor" must react somehow if things get out of hand.
For instance, the case you cited would have required AD
intervention to bring the chairs back to the right IETF process.

Anyway, let me bring up another issue related to interim
meetings and other similar tools. It seems that many of
the discussions on the problem definition WG list are related
to this or that part of the IETF not working well enough.
[Typically, it is not the part that the complainer works for ;-) .]
For instance, WGs produce crappy results that the IESG has to
reject, IESG doesn't scale to the requirements the IETF at
whole has, and so on. We've touched upon solutions related
to organization and forms of delegation. But behind these
issues there may be an even more fundamental root cause:
namely, maybe the IETF as a whole is not putting in enough
effort to produce the kind of quantity and quality that
we want to. We sure have lots of people in the rooms, but
how many actually do e.g. read the WG documents? And of those
that do, how many spend significant amount of time?

The discussion about re-orgs may address this issue,
but only indirectly. So it may be appropriate to
think about ways to increase the overall level of
effort*. There's a number of interesting questions
in this. For instance, is this about an uneven allocation
of effort on folks, or the lack of quality people? In
the solution space, how can we break the 6hrs/year meeting
time barrier, should we use interims and teleconferences
more? Should we enlarge the group of people assigned to
ensure that the Right Thing gets done, maybe as an additional
task for the chairs or advisors? Should we allocate folks
to actually do reviews, not just expect them to "happen".

Jari

*) I know some people who would rather scale down the output.
While this may be wise in certain special cases, as a general
measure I believe it would mean avoiding our responsibility to
take care of the Internet and keep it current with respect
to the needs placed on it.