Re: [I18nrp] Additional input needed for i18nRP BOF

[Peter Saint-Andre <[e-mail]>]

On 6/6/18 4:11 PM, Adam Roach wrote:
> On 6/6/18 4:19 PM, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
>> On 6/6/18 3:06 PM, Adam Roach wrote:
>>> I trust that you will attempt to
>>> provide these additional details?
>> Adam, what are the IESG's requirements and expectations regarding
>> creation of a new directorate? Is it expected, for instance, that a
>> charter of some kind will need to be provided and approved? Guidance
>> would be helpful.
> 
> With the caveat that I may have overlooked some bit of formal process...
> 
> In the general case, the creation of a new directorate simply requires
> convincing an area director that such directorate would serve a useful
> purpose. While directorates don't have charters per se, as a practical
> matter, they need to have a reasonably complete description of their
> purpose and role.
> 
> I'll note that directorates have a broad range of formality and document
> coverage associated with them: on one end, SECDIR and GENART have active
> secretaries who assign every document during IETF last call to a
> volunteer from a large pool of specialists (SECDIR) or generalists
> (GENART). On the other end, the SDPDIR has a relatively small pool of
> self-directed experts that authors, chairs and area directors can reach
> out to for advice and review. The SDPDIR does not proactively review
> documents.
> 
> In the specific case of establishing an i18n review directorate: based
> on the comments made so far, I think we would want a carefully defined
> process (possibly documented in an RFC, but perhaps just part of the
> directorate description) that described what role the directorate would
> play in the development and publication of specifications.
> 
> We would also need a plausible group of volunteers to execute that
> process. For example, if the proposed process were to review every
> document, in the style of SECDIR and GENART, I'd want to see a group of
> i18n expert volunteers (or volunteers who are willing and able to
> educate themselves into being experts) of roughly the same size as those
> directorates. For reference, the SECDIR has 64 members, and GENART has
> 27. By contrast, if the role were to provide feedback only as requested,
> it could be similar in size to the SDPDIR, which has seven members.
> 
> In practice, I suspect the process the interested parties might
> reasonably settle upon would be somewhere in between, with someone
> (possibly a rotating duty) providing light triage on documents during
> IETF last call for the purposes of identifying which have an
> intersection with i18n, and a pool of dedicated reviewers to whom
> documents that do are assigned. The number of people such activity would
> require to succeed is, of course, a judgement call, but based on the
> size and function of existing directorates, I think we can safely say
> that it is significantly more than seven, and somewhat less than 27.

Thanks for the helpful context.

SECDIR, GENART, and ARTART reviewers seem to check the whole document.
By contrast, I18N reviews would have a smaller scope (along the lines of
what the SDPDIR does). As a point of comparison, the W3C I18N WG [1] is
quite busy but is very small: John Klensin and I and a few others help
out, but most of the work is done by two people.

To gauge the scope of work for an I18N directorate, we could look at the
IESG telechat agendas for the last two months and see how many documents
would have been reviewed, and how much text in each document needed
attention.

Peter

[1] https://w3c.github.io/i18n-activity/i18n-wg/