Re: draft-housley-two-maturity-levels

[Eric Rosen <[e-mail]>]

I don't think folks have appreciated how truly insidious Russ' document is.

First, he proposes to eliminate a set of processes that are frequently used
to portray the IETF in a negative light:

- The use of the label "Standard" for the never-used third level of
  standardization

- The never-used two year limit on "Proposed Standards"

- The process by which "STD numbers" are assigned to obsolete documents, but
  not to the documents that obsolete them.

This blatant attempt to improve the public image of the IETF is an obvious
conflict of interest for the IETF chair or any other IESG member!  To the
rest of us, the ability to portray the IETF as a laughing stock is of great
value, especially when we disagree with its results.

But then comes the most insidious proposal of all: the elimination of the
prohibition against "downward references".  This clever attempt to remove
one of the disincentives to advancing documents along the standards track
may at first glance seem innocent enough.  However, if the community were to
go along with this attempt to remove disincentives, we might actually end up
with a two level standards process.  Those of us who are happy with the de
facto single level standards process should oppose this change at all costs.
(Fortunately, this tricky proposal is unlikely to succeed in its goal, as
there are so many other disincentives that the document fails to address.)

This document should be sent to a WG where it can be extensively discussed
and analyzed by those members of the community who have the most experience
in failing to achieve consensus on process change.  (Of course, first the
broader community must spend a year or two agreeing on the charter of the
WG.)  The document should then be advanced on the Standards Track, under the
current standards process.  That means that two different Standards
Development Organizations must be created independently from the process
specification in the document, and we must see an implementation report
proving that those two organizations can interoperate.  Only then will it be
appropriate to decide whether the document should become an IETF standard.

Just in case this is an insufficient method of ensuring that there is no
progress, I strongly suggest that the issue of specifying the standards
process be delayed until all issues of document input and output formats,
including internationalization, and representation of diagrams, have been
fully discussed and decided upon.