Initial Analysis of the IESG Review Process

[Eric Rescorla]

I've spent some of the past week analyzing the external face of the IESG
review process with a focus on measuring the time to approval and its
predictors. This work is still in a pretty rough stage but the initial
results are written up in a paper which can be found at:

	http://www.rtfm.com/iesg-review.pdf


ABSTRACT
We report on an analysis of the IESG Review Process.  We studied all
drafts Last Called in the period of August 1998-March 2003 in order to
characterize what factors contribute to the outcome and duration of the
process. We find substantial variation in the duration of the review
process both between drafts (sd = 149 days) and between areas
(hazard ratio = 2-3). Finally, we find that the time to approval is
loosely correlated to the number of revisions that a document goes
through before revision but we did not find sufficient evidence to
conclude that the magnitude of changes between versions was correlated
to the time to approval when the number of revisions is controlled for.

Comments welcome.
-Ekr