Document Blocking (Was: I-D

[Keith Moore]

> At 12:02 PM 5/19/2003 +0200, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
> >(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;
> 
> I agree with other comments that this could be made clearer in
> how IESG DISCUSS comments are communicated to the WG.  For
> example, why doesnt' the IESG member with the DISCUSS send a
> message directly to the WG raising the issue?

Sometimes they do, or they engage the document authors.  But this
doesn't always work well.  It can produce long protracted discussions
that don't terminate.  If multiple IESG members have objections then
it can be hard to keep track of when all the objections are satisfied.

At the same time, my experience was that there were often disconnects in
communicating Discuss concerns to WGs and document authors - not because
of a failure to try, but because the ADs and WG members were working
from very different sets of assumptions (often not well-articulated)
and/or speaking different languages.  The situation was made worse when
one AD had to be an intermediary between another AD and the WG.

So I think some form of direct communication from the objecting ADs to
the WG is appropriate, but having the responsible AD send the Discuss
comments to the WG mailing list would serve that purpose.  I also think
it's useful if the WG chairs and document authors could get the relevant
ADs on a conference call - it's often easier to resolve differences over
the phone than over email, and this could save weeks of delay.

> >after 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....)
> 
> Why are there only two choices that "the WG is wrong, or the
> documents have insufficient convincing power"?  While I don't
> think it happens very often, couldn't the IESG be wrong?

Of course.  Though if the document is misunderstood by IESG the chances
that it will be misunderstood by ordinary readers seems high.

> Also, some AD review comments and DISCUSS comments are really
> about matters of taste -- the belief that a section should be
> removed from a document because it is redundant (not wrong,
> just redundant), the opinion that some historical note should be
> added explaining why something was done a particular way, etc.
> In those cases, there may be no right or wrong.  In general,
> the IESG wins because they can block publication of the document.
> Do you think that's reasonable?

Yes -- not because the IESG is always right, but because *somebody* has
to decide, and the IESG is in a better position to make a determination
as to whether a document is suitable for the Internet as a whole than
the WG is.  You could move the burden of that decision to some other
body, but you'd still have the same problem.  Either somebody can trump
the other's desicion or you end up with a process that doesn't
terminate.