OPEN ISSUE: Standards Track

[Margaret Wasserman]

The process document current says:

>There is also a more fundamental issue with the IETF's engineering
>practices.  Although our current standards track contains three
>levels of maturity (Proposed Standard, Draft Standard and Full
>Standard), we do not have sufficient differentiation regarding the
>quality and completeness of documents required at each stage.  The
>bar is set very high for publication at Proposed Standard, and very
>few documents advance beyond this stage. [OPEN ISSUE: Do we have
>IETF consensus that this is a problem?]

I believe that this is a real issue, and that we need to make
some changes to our standards-track document processes to
address this.

In particular, I think that we have inadvertently reached a
point where our proposed standards are treated as standards
by most of the industry.  I think that this was caused, in
part, by the high level of scrutiny that we place on documents
before we allowing them to reach this level.  This also leads
to a lack of motivation to move documents to draft standard,
where there interoperability will be demonstrated.

In general, I think that this damages the quality and
integrity of the IETF standards-track documents, and we
should do something to fix it.

Margaret