Re: [81attendees] casual attendees & WG process

[Curtis Villamizar <[e-mail]>]

Before asking any question the WG chairs should ask "how many people read or at least thoroughly skimmed through this document prior to the meeting such that they understand what it contains".  Then do the "favor/opposed" polling.

One of the problems with some of the WGs is too many junk drafts.  It seems like a number of authors just want to get their name on a WG draft or RFC so that they can cite it on their resume.  In at least one case an employer was rewarding employees for submitting a draft and having it presented and the result was a lot of junk drafts from that company.  This was counterproductive to the IETF WGs in which this was occurring.

The process used to be more streamlined because a small group of people would commit to deploy a simple protocol or extension on a significant provider network, a small set of people would agree to implement it, and the WG would provide a venue for open discussion.  In a number of WGs there are authors who persistently promote drafts with no provider or vendor interest or negative expressions of interest.

We have lost touch with the "running code" part of "rough consensus and running code" and we may not be doing well on the "rough consensus" part either.  We are headed toward the design by committee and voting methods used by other SDO along with including every half thought out feature anyone imagined during the process and no implementations.  This leads to protocols that don't work with features that no one has ever implemented or where no one has ever succeeded in getting to interoperate among vendors.

Curtis

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [e-mail] [mailto:81attendees-
> [e-mail]] On Behalf Of Yoav Nir
> Sent: Monday, August 08, 2011 10:30 PM
> To: Dae Young KIM
> Cc: [e-mail]
> Subject: Re: [81attendees] diverse meeting locations (was: are we
> getting complacent? Good job!)
> 
> 
> On Aug 9, 2011, at 4:37 AM, Dae Young KIM wrote:
> 
> >   >>maybe we can also mitigate the problem of rooms too crowded
> >   >> with "IETF tourists" for people interested in doing work to get
> in?
> >
> > What's wrong for a room to be crowded because a lot of people,
> perhaps most of them watchers(?), are interested in the topic for
> whatever reasons they may have?
> 
> This is true for BoFs. But working groups should, you know, work.
> 
> There are working group sessions with about 8-10 people sitting in the
> front rows and actually listening, plus 30-40 more sitting in the back
> reading email and charging their laptops. This creates a false
> impression of the level of interest in the working group, and it also
> skews the feel of the room when trying to assess consensus. "Who thinks
> we should take on this item?" 8 people out of 50 raise their hand. How
> is the chair or AD to know that 40 of those 50 are just tourists?  It
> looks like the group has said "meh".
> 
> 
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