The "late surprise" problem

[Basavaraj.Patil at nokia.com]

Hi Brian,

The proposal outlined is definitely an effective way of ensuring 
that documents get reviewed. However some concerns:

1. Additional process overhead - Is this really warranted?
2. Creating yet another "class" of people in the IETF - against
   the perception of an open SDO 
3. Documents go through many revs - Would the review committee be
   expected to look at these docs every time? This will cause
   scalability problems.
4. Does not address the problem of ensuring that people attending
   a WG meeting have read the drafts.
5. Will result in even less people in the IETF motivated to read
   drafts since there exists the SIR group to do this work

On the +ve side:
1. The document(s) quality will improve and IESG burden is decreased

One thing to really understand is the root cause of the problem as to
why we do not have WG members doing reviews and commenting? I think
the problem lies in the fact that literally everyone attending an
IETF meeting has a draft of their own that they are trying to progress.
Given that, it is very hard to pay attention to other drafts and even
more to do a qualitiative review. 

Another thing that would help in determining the size of the SIRs
group is to obtain some stats on the number of WG LCs and IETF LCs
issued in a year. That way the suggested size of 100 can be reviewed
and scoped for sufficiency.

A suggestion to the proposal:
Instead of having an IETF wide SIR group, WGs should be more empowered
to do this. WG chairs should set up review groups for each document that 
exists in their area. This review group should be open and anyone should
be able to add their name as a volunteer as long as they are willing to
commit some time. Having this list of names associated with each WG document
on the WG charter page would be reward enough and WG chairs should be
responsible for ensuring that at least these reviewers do their job.
I think this decentralization would allow more people to be involved in
the IETF work and prevent "ruling class" perception.

Cheers,
-Basavaraj


> Actually this is a solution proposal, which Dave Crocker and I have
> been discussing the last couple of days. I think it has value, and
> it also illustrates what I think we have to do - find subsets of
> the total problem for which we can rapidly implement incremental
> solutions.
> 
>    Brian
>