MIXER example (mailing list size/activity)

[Margaret Wasserman]

Answering your message out-of-order...

At 02:12 PM 3/13/2003 +0100, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
>I don't know what that tells you....

I don't know either.  I guess I'm trying to figure out whether
the lack of timeliness of IETF work (which I think we all agree
is an issue) is caused by a process problem or a resource
problem.

Inefficient, heavy-weight or improperly balanced processes can
make work take a lot longer than it otherwise could/should.

Lack of focus, commitment, alignment and/or accountability on
the part of the people actually doing the work can also result
in the work taking too long...

In this case:

>I think the number of new issues was actually very, very low; mostly it 
>had to
>do with the way to treat delivery notifications - the rest was just 
>integrating
>and fine-tuning previous work.

This might have been a process problem.  Would it have made
sense to organize the work differently to allow the parts of
the protocol that did have consensus to move ahead?  Could the
protocol have gone to PS with these issues unresolved? Not clear
from the information I have available.

>The most vexing issue I remember was getting the cycles to do the
>editing done; both primary authors were convinced most of the time
>that they were absolutely the best person to do the job, that getting
>a new person into the editing cycle would just make the project slower,
>and that they would get around to doing the final-final batch of updates
>"next month, at the latest" - which then turned into 3 months later and
>just before another IETF, at which time a few more people read and
>commented on it, which comments needed to be integrated, which was to
>  be done "next week for sure"......

This is a resource problem.  Lack of focus, commitment and
accountability...  We seem to hit this a lot at the end of IETF
projects, and the fix isn't obvious to me.

Would better WG chair management have fixed this problem?  For
example, should the WG chair have fired the authors/editors and
found someone else with more time/energy to complete the work?

Or is this just inevitable, somehow, at the end of a "volunteer"
project?

Margaret