Documenting consensus (RE: making strategic problems concrete)

[Spencer Dawkins]

Harald is talking about a problem that's broader than just
figuring out where a working group is in the consensus
building/declaring process - it's an obstacle whenever someone
wants to find out what a working group is doing, how far along
it is, and where the working group needs help.

If I was responding to Harald's point - I'd say something like:

"there is no consistent level of summary higher than individual
mailing list threads and lower than Internet Drafts, and there
is no consistent level of summary higher than Internet Drafts
and lower than per-IETF summary presentations - the effects
include (1) difficult for experts who aren't participating in
the working group to identify holes that the working group needs
to address (canonical examples might be security or transport
issies like congestion avoidance), (2) difficult assimilation of
new working group participants, (3) repeated visits to a topic
because new participants and outside experts don't know where
the working group has been previously"

Stepping back a moment - I started participating in IETF in
1996, and I remember "you should look at the mailing list
archives about that" being a pretty frequent statement. I hear
it a lot less frequently today - is this your experience?

Jonathan Rosenberg is certainly a SIP guy, and Jonathan said in
an open meeting (Pittsburg, I believe?) that HE couldn't keep up
with the entire SIP mailing list. 

Most working group mailing lists likely have a lower volume of
posting (SIP's was high enough to justify a second SIPPING
working group to do triage), but the point remains.

<SOLUTION SPACE>

Periodic summaries (monthly?) would likely help significantly in
cross-group discussions - significantly more than presentations
to bring semi-participants up to speed at an IETF so these
semi-participants can provide real help with protocol
development.

</SOLUTION SPACE>

I don't think Harald's point has appeared in Problem Statement
discussions to date, and my own experience is that it's true in
my case - can we add it to the (minimal) 01 draft revision?

Spencer

--- Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald at alvestrand.no> wrote:
> 
> But speaking as someone who has all too little ability to
> actively 
> participate in our working groups, and all too much reason to
> want to dive 
> into a working group to find out what's happening at times, I
> think it's 
> also a mechanism problem - in order to find out what good work
> the chairs 
> have been doing in asserting and documenting consensus, I
> either have to 
> scan mailing list archives or figure out where *this* working
> group keeps 
> its non-standard extra web pages (or whatever other mechanism
> it uses).

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