Re: Late review management (Re: [Icar] independence of reviews; variability)

>Once again, diversity of perspectives is our friend... that is, if we
>believe in community rough consensus, rather than hierarchical assertion
>of authority.

This touches on a thought I've had off-and-on for the past couple of years...

The current IETF structures, policies and processes are based on some 
fundamental assumptions two of which are (1) that making decisions by 
rough consensus, reached through an open process will achieve good 
results, and (2) we can select leaders (ADs, WG chairs, etc.) and 
trust them to fairly solicit, judge and act upon rough community 
consensus.  Sometimes, though, we seem to question those assumption, 
and we end up adding structures, policies or processes that are 
intended to protect us from the results of our own consensus-driven 
decisions.  I think that is (and has been) a mistake.

While there is no decision making process (hierarchical, democratic, 
I just get to decide...) that achieves good results all of the time, 
the consensus-driven process has worked well for the IETF over the 
years.  By failing to trust it, we don't actually move to another 
effective decision making process, we just break the one that we have.

I think that this same line of thinking applies to review...  We 
should put into place the mechanisms, tools, training, etc. to 
improve the community's capacity to provide quality review.  Perhaps 
we should provide mechanisms that help WGs' find and recruit 
reviewers.  We could even develop some guidelines about what type and 
quantity of review makes sense at each level.  But, ultimately, I 
think that we should trust that our WGs (and our WG chairs, document 
editors, etc.) actually _want_ to  produce good quality, 
well-reviewed work.  We can improve their ability to do that by 
giving them better tools, but we won't achieve anything by trying to 
enforce quality through "better" rules.

If we decide, as a community, that we can no longer trust the 
consensus process and/or the motivations of our ADs, WG chairs or 
document editors, we have a _much_ bigger problem than can be solved 
by changing our review processes.

Margaret

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