Re: Please Review Draft IESG Statement on Activities that are OBE

--On Tuesday, February 03, 2009 11:40 -0600 Spencer Dawkins
<spencer@wonderhamster.org> wrote:

> Speaking as someone who usually doesn't know what the IESG is
> thinking ... ;-)
>... 
Spencer,

Since you addressed part of your comments to me, let me try a
specific answer:

(1) Anything that clearly shifts this document toward "guidance
to the community about how the IESG is thinking about things"
and away from "more rules" will make me proportionally happier.
Certainly eliminating the 2119 language would help in that
regard.

(2) The reason I asked the question about what the problem was
being solved is that I don't believe we have an OBE
specification problem.  I believe we have a problem that derives
from an apparently growing reluctance on the part of the IESG to
shut down disfunctional and non-productive WGs and WGs that are
just not worth the resources they consume.  The OBE situation is
just a special case of that more general problem.  I imagine
that the reluctance is caused by the IESG not believing it has
community support for such shutdowns.  More specifically, while
much of the community favors them in the abstract, shutting down
a WG will almost always upset those who have invested work in it
and, in today's IETF, they will be a lot louder than those who
will applaud the action.  If that is, in fact, the problem, then
I don't think posting this document as a special case will solve
it. At the same time, if the IESG has decided that, even if they
can't or won't solve the disfunctional WG problem generally,
they are willing to take a stand about the OBE case, I'm in
favor of it.

(3) Finally, reprising many comments and specific suggestions
over the years, I believe "under what circumstances should we
shut this WG down?" is the wrong question.  Instead, we should
be devising criteria, interpreting benchmarks, and possibly
using IESG turnover as triggers for review of WGs, reviews that
start from the assumption that, beyond a certain point, a WG
needs to justify its continued existence rather than requiring
an AD to justify calling it off.  I don't know if it is still
possible to do that in the IETF, but I note that ISO (including
ISO/IEC JTC1) learned the value of shutting down projects how to
do that, in part, from us and created more specific sunset and
timeout procedures around it than we ever had... and that,
during the same period, we forgot how to shut WGs down when they
were not performing.

   john

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