Document Blocking (Was: I-D

Keith Moore moore at cs.utk.edu
Sun May 18 01:17:04 CEST 2003


On Saturday, May 17, 2003, at 08:53  PM, Margaret Wasserman wrote:

> At 10:25 AM 5/17/2003 -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
>> My recollection is that during the time that I was on IESG it became 
>> much
>> less acceptable for an AD to explain his reasons for a Discuss at a 
>> later
>> time.  By the end of my 2nd term we were expected to exlain our 
>> reasons at the
>> time we voted Discuss.
>
> Explain them to whom?  The rest of the IESG?  What good does that
> do for the WG, if the reasons aren't documented and mailed to the
> WG mailing list?

well...there's a fair amount of presumption in those questions.

providing an explanation to IESG forced the objecting AD to come up 
with some explanation within two weeks, rather than waiting until he 
found the time to figure out how to explain what was wrong.  
essentially, it made providing such explanations a high-priority task 
where it wasn't so beforehand, and this substantially reduced the 
amount of time it took to get feedback to WGs.  it also made it at 
least somewhat more difficult for an IESG member to block a document on 
trivial grounds, since the other IESG members could and did push back 
on ADs whose objections seemed trivial.

of course the responsible AD _was_ expected to communicate those 
objections to the appropriate parties, which generally meant the 
document authors for minor fixes and the WG mailing list for major 
changes.  and these days the IESG member's discuss comments also end up 
on the web via the document tracker.



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