OPEN ISSUE: Standards Track

[john.loughney at nokia.com]

Hi Spencer,

> >There is also a more fundamental issue with the IETF's engineering
> >practices.  Although our current standards track contains three
> >levels of maturity (Proposed Standard, Draft Standard and Full
> >Standard), we do not have sufficient differentiation regarding the
> >quality and completeness of documents required at each stage.  The
> >bar is set very high for publication at Proposed Standard, and very
> >few documents advance beyond this stage. [OPEN ISSUE: Do we have
> >IETF consensus that this is a problem?]
> 
> We're hearing proposed solutions to this problem, so it looks like there
> are folks who agree that it's a problem.
> 
> Are there folks who DON'T agree that this is a problem?

OK, I'll bite.  This may be a problem, but I don't see this problem
as being on the critical path of problems we should solve. I am not sure
how changing the above will help us produce useful & timely standards.

The reason I say this is because other organizations, companies & marketers
are already quite happy to take IETF drafts into use, even if these have
no permanent status.  

I would not be opposed to cleaning up our standards track process, because
I think it would be useful - but I see this a smaller problem as compared
to some others ...

John

PS - on a related note, does anyone think it could be useful to try to make 
Experimental RFCs less of a second-class citizen?  My feeling is that
there is some work we may not want to completely embrace with a standards
designation, but something that lets folks go out & trial things and
come back with their findings (note - this comment implies that there
are those who think the label 'Experimental' is almost as bad as sending
something to the IRTF!)