My thoughts about the problems of the IETF

[Spencer Dawkins]

I took Brian's pointer on IAB minutes, and went back and looked at the first
minutes for 1992, 1998, and at the most recent minutes posted (March 2003).

I really like the IAB minutes from 1991, and I guess the point is, I learned
a lot from reading them, even twelve years later.

I would like to think that IAB is having the same quality of discussion now,
but it's not obvious from the meeting minutes. From the meeting minutes, it
looks like they've moved from discussing ideas to discussing document
status.

We're adding "don't know how to work on multi-area/complex problems" to our
list, I believe? Maybe good IAB minutes would be an investment in training
for some of the rest of us?

And Ted's point about personnel discussions being private is understood.

Back to Jonne's thread: I don't know whether IESG discussions would teach me
as much, or not, but I learn enough from ADs in one-on-one conversations to
suspect that IESG doesn't just vote on documents...

Spencer

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ted Hardie" <hardie at qualcomm.com>
To: <Jonne.Soininen at nokia.com>
Cc: <problem-statement at alvestrand.no>
Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2003 12:04 PM
Subject: Re: My thoughts about the problems of the IETF


> Hi Jonne,
> It does, and thanks for sharing your thoughts.  The only real
> difficulty
> I see is the practical question of who does the minutes.  At the moment,
> the Secretariat does the current action-oriented minutes; that makes
> sense
> because they often have an action to perform based on a particular
> decision (send an announcement, return an action to a later agenda,
> etc.).
> A transcript is a sufficiently low-filter that a clerk could do it from
> a recording
> (not that this a job I would wish on _anyone_, by the way).  But the
> medium
> filter work is actually harder--"The group discussed the merits of
> Frobnitzzles vs. Whangdoodles for 15 minutes, with Randy's view
> that Whangdoodles are operationally easier to deploy winning the
> day over Steve's view that Frobnitzzles provide a better model for
> confidentiality".  Creating that kind of summary requires both a lot
> of knowledge of the background and a good ability to boil disconnected,
> sometimes overlapping statements into a coherent whole.  In working
> groups, a participant usual does that job exactly because they can
> understand the discussion well enough to record actions and
> summarize discussion.  Note that the high filter summary is actually
> easier--"The group  approved Whangdoodles for Proposed Standard" being
> something that the Secretariat can confirm at the end of discussion
> in real time.
> We can certainly think about the question of how to improve the
> minutes and get the agendas made public; I also suspect that once
> they are more readily available that we will find some issues that
> require
> minuting at the current level of detail (any personnel issues are
> private,
> for example).  So we may well not have a "one size fits all"  result.
> regards,
> Ted Hardie