Re: Issues around sponsoring individual documents

["tom.petch" <[e-mail]>]

I said before on this Apps list that I saw some IS as potentially damaging: the
sort of thing I had in mind is the I-D draft-hartman-webauth-phishing-05.txt,
currently  being discussed on the IETF main list.  This has failed to achieve
consensus and the document shepherd now proposes to seek consensus on a non-IETF
list.  OK, the list is public and publicised, but this topic is a really big one
for Internet users and if the IETF cannot muster a Working Group to hammer the
ideas into shape, then we should not be working on it - IMHO.  And, by
implication, no AD should be sponsoring it.

This is about the tenth such discussion on the main IETF list that has grabbed
my attention in 2007 - details vary, but all seem to say to me that 'this I-D
should not
have got this far in this state' - and almost all are IS.  Ironically, one such
I-D is draft-housley-tls-authz-extns which Sam Hartman sponsored and then didn't
and then ... well, read the archives of the main list.

Tom Petch

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lisa Dusseault" <[e-mail]>
To: "Apps Discuss" <[e-mail]>
Sent: Friday, September 07, 2007 10:20 PM
Subject: Re: Issues around sponsoring individual documents


> Didn't mean to name names publicly!  But as long as I am, I might as
> well characterize the ISs.
>
> Some are being run practically as if they are WG documents, with
> commentary on active WG or post-WG lists.  James' and John's are in
> that category, as well as the IMAP i18n/collation docs.
> One is likely to become the standard extensibility discovery
> mechanism for a WG standard -- James'.
> Some are revising very widely used standards.  John's and Dave's are
> in that category.
> Nearly half are URI scheme registrations, which must be IETF
> Consensus documents in order for the IANA registration to be
> allowed.  Others register a single mail header, VCard property
> (Cullen's) or MIME type.
> A few are effectively from outside organizations including Odette,
> ISO, GSM, 3GPP and XMPP.
> One is attempting to describe requirements for future work, rather
> than define an implementable standard -- Sam's.
>
> Three ID authors requesting sponsoring have been fellow ADs (Sam,
> Cullen, Chris).
> Nine primary authors were people I've never met.
> Eight primary authors were people I have met at IETF meetings or
> elsewhere.
>
> IMO, most are good causes.  Most are good quality.  YMMV.
>
> Lisa
>
> On Sep 7, 2007, at 1:00 PM, Lisa Dusseault wrote:
>
> >
> > On Sep 7, 2007, at 8:32 AM, James M Snell wrote:
> >
> >> Having written several IS drafts, one of which reached Proposed
> >> Standard
> >> status and another Experimental RFC, and another that I believe might
> >> have helped to motivate this particular note from you,...
> >
> >
> > Yes, but this wasn't the only one!  Efforts by Dave Crocker and
> > John Klensin are also prompting this line of questioning.  But
> > Paul's request added to yours to publish the Atom feature
> > advertisement spec did prompt finishing the email to send it.
> >
> > I asked Paul if he'd be document shepherd for that spec, by the
> > way, to do the work of determining what consensus was for which
> > features to include, to write the doc shepherd's overview & help
> > the process along.  I'm not sure he thought that was inappropriate
> > or just not something he had the time to do, but he declined.
> >
> > thanks,
> > Lisa
>
>