Document Blocking (Was: I-D

Keith Moore moore at cs.utk.edu
Fri May 16 17:27:43 CEST 2003


> >[Scott Bradner:]
> >>in my experience, from time to time it was the case that I did not 
> >>see IESG consensus support for the concerns of a specific AD but 
> >>the normal IESG process does not make it easy to get around a 
> >>single AD's discuss - there is a process that was defined to do 
> >>this but it has never been used, and that process would not get 
> >>around a case where two ADs had issues that the rest of the IESG 
> >>did not share
> >
> >concur. very occasionally, it seemed to me that another IESG 
> >member's concerns were either unfounded or too trivial to hold up 
> >passage of the document. and at least while I was there, we didn't 
> >have a good way to work past those problems.
> 
> I don't understand how that jibes with:
> 
> >>The problem with the current process (as I understand it) is that 
> >>it allows documents to be blocked by one or two IESG members 
> >>without the consensus of the group.
> >
> >I don't see this as a problem at all.
> 
> You concur with the problem outlined by Scott above: There have been 
> (perhaps rare) cases where someone claimed there to be a serious 
> enough problem to hold up a document where the other IESG member's 
> concerns were unfounded, yet there was no way to work past this hold 
> up.

I think my biggest problem was with the suggestion that IESG consensus
should be required to block a document, when that's clearly not
feasible.  

I do think it would be useful to have some sort of mechanism (lighter
weight than an appeal) by which a WG or IESG could push back on a single
IESG member's objections when they seemed trivial or poorly founded. 
I don't have a good suggestion for how to do that, but I do feel certain
that requiring IESG consensus on every Discuss is too onerous.

> >Many of the issues that hold up document publication are not easily 
> >understood without expertise in that particular area.
> 
> But if the expert in that area can't explain to the rest of the IESG 
> why all should agree with the "discuss", then:
> 
> a) Perhaps it's unfounded

Perhaps, but on balance it is safer to give the objecting IESG member
the benefit of the doubt.  And these days the co-AD often serves as a
moderating influence in practice, even if he doesn't have formal power
to veto his co-AD's Discuss.

> b) How on earth is that "expert" going to explain it sufficiently to 
> the working group whose document is being held up.

Often this is difficult, because the WG lacks the very expertise that is
needed to understand the problem.  But we shouldn't blame the IESG for
the WG's lack of expertise.

> As Dave said, "No matter how stellar the expertise of someone, if 
> they cannot convince others that their views are correct, something 
> is very, very wrong."

And sometimes Dave is very, very wrong.  What I might argue instead is
that if success of a protocol hinges on something that is too subtle for
most of its implementors and designers to understand, that success is
doubtful even if the protocol specification properly considers that
subtlety. But even that isn't always true. 

> >Also, IESG does not "block" documents, it explains what is wrong 
> >with them and sends them back to the working group.
> 
> But, as Scott said:
> 
> >>...since it can take an arbitrarily long time for the working group 
> >>(or document authors/editors) to respond to the concerns and an 
> >>arbitrarily long time for the back and forth between the AD for the 
> >>working group, the AD holding the discuss, the working group 
> >>chairs, and the working group the effect of the process may not be 
> >>distinguishable from a decision to not publish.

Right, but IESG has timeouts in place for almost all phases of its
deliberative process.   It's the WG that can hold up things for
arbitrary amounts of time (sometimes because the authors and/or chair
are sitting on the document and the WG doesn't know what is happening,
sometimes because the WG refuses to make changes and doesn't know what
to do next).   

Now it might be useful to have a well-documented process by which
IESG provides feedback to a WG on a document, including public
disclosure of the feedback on a web page, and to have an explicit
timeout by which a WG is expected to:

a. revise the document and resubmit to IESG
b. outline a plan for fixing the document and ask for approval of 
   that plan
c. abandon the document
d. appeal

But it would be even more useful to try to get an explicit dialogue
going between the relevant ADs and the relevant WG participants,
because most problems can be solved in this way.  

It's a real trick to outline a process that both streamlines getting
things fixed that need to be fixed (hopefully the normal case), and at
the same time provides mechanisms to safeguard against abuse.  Most
problems will be solved by dialogue, but it's hard to engage in
productive dialogue under a deadline, say if you know you've got to
resolve things in X days or you'll get burned.  

> >It's simply infeasible to expect all of IESG to reach consensus on 
> >every issue that requires a change to a document. For a deep 
> >technical issue, there *might* be four people on IESG who really 
> >have enough appreciation for that issue to express an informed 
> >opinion - and two of those might have to stretch to understand it.
> 
> We're not talking about cases where some members of the IESG have a 
> technical issue and the rest say, "Well, I don't understand that well 
> enough to have a technical opinion on this, but you've convinced me 
> it's a serious enough issue to warrant discussing the document 
> further." That *is* consensus to discuss the document. It's when the 
> objecting members *don't* explain the problem sufficiently to 
> convince the others that there even *is* a serious issue. The IESG 
> certainly *must* come to consensus that there is a real issue before 
> stopping a document from moving along.

Sometimes only one person on IESG really understands the problem. 
Maybe that AD should need to come up with some more support for his
position somehow, if not on IESG than somewhere else.  Maybe he should
get to write a dissenting opinion.   But I don't think it's reasonable
to dismiss those concerns simply because nobody else on IESG understands
them.  And I think that at least initially the presumption should be
that the AD is right - because he usually is, and he's having to stick
out his neck to raise this objection.

(Even before we had public disclosure of the IESG ballots, new ADs
learned fairly quickly that raising substantial objections could cost
them both in terms of ease of working with other IESG peoople, and in
temrs of the time spent in discussion with the relevant parties to try
to work out the differences.  So there's a significant incentive to
avoid raising non-trivial objections, sometimes even when they're fairly
important.  One result is that ADs raise trivial objections when more
serious objections are really warranted.)

> >A common case is to have one or two Yes votes, one or two Discuss 
> >votes, and the rest No Objection. That's not a case of one or two 
> >people holding up the document against an overwhelming majority. 
> >It's more like a tie.
> 
> I would be deeply concerned if there were one or two Discuss, two 
> Yes, and the rest No Objection *and* the Discuss voter(s) couldn't 
> convince any of the Yes or No Objection people to change their votes 
> to Discuss.

That's not the way it works.  Since every Discuss vote has to be
explicitly changed before the document can move forward, issues get
resolved faster when there are fewer Discuss votes, and the polite thing
to do is to not vote Discuss when someone else has already raised the
same objection.  so if you get multiple Discuss votes only when there
is a very strong and widespread objection to a document, or when there
are widely varying objections to a document.

> >(I should clarify that IMHO the vast majority of IESG Discuss 
> >concerns were well-founded and appropriate.)
> 
> That might be true. Understand, though, that given the current 
> process, it is impossible to tell the difference between the ones the 
> IESG considers well-founded and the one's it does not.

I don't know whether this can be fixed.  What seems to one person
to be a trivial or unfounded concern might actually be deep wisdom.

Keith


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