Document Blocking (Was: I-D

[John C Klensin]

--On Monday, 19 May, 2003 12:02 +0200 Harald Tveit Alvestrand 
<harald at alvestrand.no> wrote:

> --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
>>...
> 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.

This is a significant improvement.  Have you seen the difference 
in throughput?

Just for clarification, this applies to _all_ documents -- 
standards-track and not, and both WG-originated and individual 
submissions.  Right?

> (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....)

It seems to me that this is a call for more WG training and/or 
for an explicit, boilerplate, cover note from IESG members to 
WGs (and individual authors) indicating precisely that 
additional explanation would be as welcome as a change.   The 
latter, at least, would seem to be easy to implement.

    john