Mentoring [Re: "Adult supervision"]

[Jari Arkko]

Spencer Dawkins wrote:
> Brian/Edward,
> 
> Might a problem statement for this be:
> 
> - We don't have a good way to help new participants learn "things everyone
> knows". The "Tao of the IETF" is focused on work style, not technical
> principles. When we try to reveal guiding technical principles as part of
> post-WG document review, the input is a "late surprise", and the process
> does not scale.

Yes. Perhaps one step towards this would be to produce more documentation
of "things everyone knows", or the desired direction of the Internet
technical development. While this does require effort, it probably requires
less effort than telling the same issues to everyone in person, and then
repeating the process every year. Additionally, the IETF process would
ensure that we'd have IETF-wide consensus on these issues.

For instance, there's been some recent documents on how to write
security considerations sections, how to apply specific security
protocols to applications, etc. This kind of work is quite useful,
but I suspect more documentation on various different issues would
be needed. For instance, in one case we had a lot of discussions
with the IESG on extensibility of protocols and how desireable that
is (or not) in the Internet. Perhaps that could be the subject of
one BCP RFC.

Anyways, I can see that www.iab.org/draft-iab.html has some
useful documents, some of which I hadn't seen before. Hmm...
perhaps we need also additional marketing of such documents in
areas that can benefit from them.

--Jari