OPEN ISSUE: Standards Track

[James Kempf]

Margaret,

I've felt for some time that there is a need for a change in this
area, but this analysis leaves out the issue of Working Group drafts,
which I think is a critical component. Right now, they have grey area
status. I've seen drafts move from individual contribution to Working
Group status only because nobody on the mailing list spoke up when the
Working Group chair put out the question about whether a draft should
move to Working Group status or not. Many vendors start implementing
when something becomes a Working Group draft, since realistically,
they view that move as entry into the standardization process,
regardless of what IETF's process RFCs say about it.

Arguments have been made on this list that we should not touch the
current Proposed/Draft distinction, and I agree that the distinction
is useful even if Proposed is treated as "standard" by vendors for all
practical purposes (Full Standard, however, is largely useless except
as a historical distinction). However, I think some attention is
needed to how a draft becomes a Working Group draft. Perhaps that move
is when a preliminary review is made on the design, so that movement
to Working Group draft status does not happen for reasons that have
nothing to do with the technical aspects of the design.

            jak

----- Original Message -----
From: "Margaret Wasserman" <mrw at windriver.com>
To: <problem-statement at alvestrand.no>
Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2003 8:41 AM
Subject: OPEN ISSUE: Standards Track


>
> 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
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