MIXER example (mailing list size/activity)

Keith Moore moore at cs.utk.edu
Thu Mar 13 19:56:08 CET 2003


On Thursday, March 13, 2003, at 08:59  AM, Margaret Wasserman wrote:
>  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.

does it have to be an either-or?  it's fairly clear to me that we have 
both kinds of problem (at least many working groups have trouble 
working effectively, which I'd claim is a problem with our process), 
and both kinds of problem affect timeliness.  actually, they compound 
each other, because the failure of working groups to produce good 
quality output in a timely fashion increases the resource drain on IESG.


>> 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?

Not really.  IIRC, the problem simply wasn't an inability to reach 
consensus, there were very few divisive issues.  It was that the two 
people who were believed to be absolutely critical to the document's 
success had trouble finding time to work on document revisions.  I 
didn't help that X.400 is so baroque, and that the nature of gateways 
is that there are lots of weird details to specify.  Bringing on 
another document author would not have helped, because the 'absolutely 
critical' people would still have had to review and comment on the 
other author's contribution.

> 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?

Probably not.  Again, the two primary authors were viewed as essential. 
  Very few people had the expertise to write that document.

Another question worth asking is whether the WG should have been shut 
down or declared dormant when it failed to make timely progress.  IESG 
is very reluctant to shut down working groups - it makes people angry 
and it looks like failure.  But if there is a shortage of people to do 
the work, maybe the work isn't as important as it seemed at first.  Or 
if the work is important, maybe it's better done by means other than an 
IETF working group.

our working groups are like Maslow's hammer - we tend to act as if they 
were the solution to every problem, even though we should know better.

Keith



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