OPEN ISSUE: Standards Track

[Keith Moore]

> >> 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?
> 
> how does this 'problem' do damage to
> 
>    the ietf's goal is to produce high quality, relevant, and timely
>    standards for internet technology.

well, what we currently have is for most purposes a single stage of
review.  perhaps we'd produce higher quality and more relevant documents
if we imposed some earlier review, and perhaps we'd get those documents
done in a more timely fashion if the early reviews identified problems
that are expensive (or time consuming) to fix if not discovered until
later.