Re: [Gendispatch] WG Review: General Area Dispatch (gendispatch)

[Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[e-mail]>]

Chiming in very late hear, but only to say something I hope is encouraging
...

On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 7:19 AM Alissa Cooper <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Hi Ben,
>
> > On Oct 11, 2019, at 3:12 PM, Ben Campbell <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> >> On Oct 11, 2019, at 4:10 AM, Alissa Cooper <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi Ben,
> >>
> >>> On Oct 10, 2019, at 6:05 PM, Ben Campbell <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Here’s an attempt to distill my concern a little better:
> >>>
> >>> The “dispatch process” can reasonably be thought of as a triage
> process. Triage makes sense when you don’t have the time and resources to
> address every problem and have to pick and choose where you can have the
> most impact. If you do have time and resources to address everything, then
> triage is just a process bump.
> >>>
> >>> Do we believe that GEN area proposals will routinely exceed our
> capacity to discuss them? If so, do we think that will continue to be true
> for the foreseeable future? (I assume this is intended to be a long-lived
> wg).
> >>
> >> I guess I see the question differently. If there are people in the
> community who are willing to manage discussions about process proposals
> while they’re in formation (i.e., people willing to chair this WG), that
> seems like a better arrangement than the current one both from the
> perspective of being more community-led and from the perspective of the
> other time commitments that the IESG has. If the WG isn’t busy or meeting
> all the time, that’s fine — it will still be nice to have it there for
> times when process proposals do come up and inspire discussion.
> >
> > I think I’ve been unclear in my concern. I have no objection to having a
> working group for discussion of proposals to improve processes. I think
> that’s a good idea. My question is about whether such working group should
> be limited to the dispatch process.
> >
> > Certainly there may be case where there it is appropriate dispatch work
> to some other venue, spin up a new wg for a proposal, etc. But I wonder why
> we need to decide in advance that work on a proposal will cannot be
> completed by this group. Especially when it seems likely that the people
> working on a proposal will often be the same whether the work happens in
> gendispatch or somewhere else.
>
> Ah, got it. This is a good question. Perhaps we can try it in
> dispatch-style for awhile and see if we’re often arriving at an outcome
> where it seems like just processing a document in the WG would be the most
> logical thing to do. If so, a re-charter to allow that would be possible. I
> was a little hesitant to jump straight to having a General Area Working
> Group; the dispatch-style group seemed like it could be a useful
> intermediate step.
>

I think trying something Dispatch-style will be helpful - it was helpful
for then-RAI to have a way to sort through proposals without having to spin
up full BOFs - and I'm reading Alissa's note here as "I want to try to do
something that could improve things, and if we need to change what we're
starting with in order to improve things, we can make changes, and keep
trying to Do The Right Thing".

That would be lovely.

Best of luck!

Spencer