Document Blocking (Was: I-D

Harald Tveit Alvestrand harald at alvestrand.no
Mon May 19 13:02:11 CEST 2003



--On 17. mai 2003 08:01 -0400 John C Klensin <john-ietf at jck.com> wrote:

>> when an AD has an issue with a document and has voted
>> "discuss" the document and the issues are discussed during an
>> IESG teleconference - sometimes the discussion results in the
>> AD changing their evaluation and removing their "discuss"
>
> And sometimes, it results in the AD saying, more or less, "I will explain
> my reasons in a note or draft writeup".  At that stage, unless there is a
> clear consensus that the AD is off base, the IESG will give the AD as
> much time as needed to do that writeup (after all, each AD might be in
> the same position next time).  That can take an arbitrarily long time.

replying to a sub-point of a sub-point in this thread (more later...)

actually we imposed a deadline on ourselves last year.
Discuss writeups are due before the next telechat, or the Discuss will be 
considered lifted. Most Discusses that are communicated vocally on the call 
have their writeups on the list before the end of the call; Discusses that 
come in on email have their writeup with them, of course.

Note that not all writeups need to be long - for instance, Randy's DISCUSS 
comment on EPP was about one sentence long, but it re-triggered a huge 
debate within the WG about appropriate considerations for privacy.

(tangential..... I am sometimes frustrated that WGs seem to take a Discuss 
as "declaration from on high that a technical decision needs to be 
changed", rather than as a challenge asking them to explain their positions 
better; afrter all, what has happened is that the IESG has failed to 
understand that the WG position is reasonable; either the WG is wrong, or 
the documents have insufficient convincing power - increasing the 
convincing power SHOULD be the right answer in some cases. But that seems 
rare....)

                       Harald





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