An overview of where the IETF change process is currently at

Harald Tveit Alvestrand harald at alvestrand.no
Sun Sep 28 10:44:59 CEST 2003



--On 28. september 2003 11:46 -0400 Melinda Shore <mshore at cisco.com> wrote:

> 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.

this makes sense to me. For one thing, it is important for people to say 
WHY they object, not just that they object - and this approach seems able 
to capture some of that. There's always some reason for their objection - 
some property they want the process to have - and getting that formulated 
is important.

> 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?

I think we all agree that the process needs to come to the best conclusions 
for the Internet - that is, it needs to propose "high quality, timely 
process changes to facilitate making high quality, timely standards". Or 
something like that.

The question is what properties it needs to have in order to achieve that.

                           Harald




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