An overview of where the IETF change process is currently at

Melinda Shore mshore at cisco.com
Sun Sep 28 12:46:44 CEST 2003


On Sunday, September 28, 2003, at 10:12 AM, Harald Tveit Alvestrand 
wrote:
> To facilitate this interaction, I've put up an overview Web page at 
> <http://www.ietf.org/u/chair/change-status.html> that attempts to give 
> a broad overview of things going on.

Thanks!  It's very helpful.

The working group is currently stymied on the question of how to
proceed with longer-term organizational and process changes, and
that's obviously not good.  Avri and I need to talk some more
about how to break the logjam but one thing that concerns me a
great deal is how we're going to be able to come to consensus
when there's strong opposition to pretty much every option that's
been put forward.  One thing we have discussed is that it may
be useful to identify the characteristics that the process itself
needs to have.  While this may sound too process-heavy or too
therapy-cultureish, I do think that it may help take some of
the heat out of the discussion and provide some more objective
criteria for discussing options moving forward (not to mention
provide some operating parameters for whatever process is
identified).  If it appears that the discussion is unproductive
or circular it will be stopped.

Some of the characteristics that might be considered include
things like whether or not it should be consensus-based, how
transparent it should be, how the community should be able to
provide input, and so on.  What's important?  What's not?

Melinda



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