My thoughts about the problems of the IETF

[Ted Hardie]

Jonne,
	I think what are produced really are meeting minutes, and I suspect
you want something different (a transcript, possibly?).    Meeting 
minutes
that adopt a "he said/she said" format end up being difficult
to extract the salient information from (what was decided?  who is 
holding
the token for a particular action?).  Rather than have every reader
do it for herself or himself, the format that exists now has evolved
to try to capture that data for later reference.
	The "he said" "she said" version of a current IESG meeting
would be boring (at least to me), as the ADs are required to send 
DISCUSS
comments in writing in advance.  What might be better would be
a version of the minutes that included links to the tracked comments,
so that you could easily follow from the action item to the ballot.
As an example, the decision that draft-ietf-group-draft remained
under discussion would be linked to:

https://www.ietf.org/IESG/EVALUATIONS/draft-ietf-group-draft.bal,

so you could follow up immediately.  I think that would give you
a far better view into the real issues than trying to read through
a doc that included each of us going "Which draft are we on?"
at least once per session.  Using links rather than included
docs means, of course, that you need to read it online, but
an email-friendly version could probably also be developed.
	Since this is problem statement, let me suggest that the
problem here is lack of visibility into the IESG discussions
which effect progress of documents.
					regards,
							Ted Hardie

		

On Monday, May 5, 2003, at 02:38 PM, <Jonne.Soininen at nokia.com> wrote:

> Hi Keith,
>
>> well, any actual objections to protocol actions have to be written up,
>> rather than merely mentioned in a telechat, in order to have any
>> effect.  and those are now available in the tracking system.
>>
>> it may be that IESG meetings are more boring than you thought.
>>
>
> You may be right. However, the good thing about meeting minutes is 
> that you can skip over things. Actually, it is sometimes better to 
> read the minutes than be present in the meetings... ;)
>
> However, I would really find real minutes useful, and I would not 
> believe that it imposes impossible work load for the IESG.
>
>>> In addition, what I would like to see is also the
>>> IESG meeting agendas (before the meetings), and the meeting
>> calendar.
>>
>> I doubt it would be difficult or controversial to provide either one.
>> but again, the document tracker pretty much provides these things
>> already.
>
> I find ID tracker extremely useful, but I still believe that it serves 
> a bit of a different purpose than meeting minutes. I think they are 
> complementing things instead of mutually exclusive. I think they 
> should hold a bit of different topics (e.g. WG creation, charter 
> discussions)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jonne.
>