Re: When to adopt a draft as a WG doc (was RE: "IETF work is done on the mailing lists")

[Geoff Huston <[e-mail]>]

On 29/11/2012, at 2:36 AM, "George, Wes" <[e-mail]> wrote:

>> From: [e-mail] [mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of
>> John Leslie
>> 
>>    I'm increasingly seeing a "paradigm" where the review happens
>> _before_ adoption as a WG draft. After adoption, there's a great lull
>> until the deadline for the next IETF week. There tend to be a few,
>> seemingly minor, edits for a version to be discussed. The meeting time
>> is taken up listing changes, most of which get no discussion. Lather,
>> rinse, repeat...
> 
> [WEG] I've seen several discussions recently across WG lists, WG chairs list, etc about this specific topic, and it's leading me to believe that we do not have adequate guidance for either WG chairs or participants on when it is generally appropriate to adopt a draft as a WG document. I see 3 basic variants just among the WGs that I'm actively involved in:
> 1) adopt early because the draft is talking about a subject the WG wants to work on (may or may not be an official charter milestone), and then refine a relatively rough draft through several I-D-ietf-[wg]-* revisions before WGLC
> 2) adopt after several revisions of I-D-[person]-[wg]-* because there has been enough discussion to make the chairs believe that the WG has interest or the draft has evolved into something the WG sees as useful/in charter; Then there are only minor tweaks in the draft up until WGLC (the above model)
> 3) don't adopt the draft until some defined criteria are met (e.g. interoperable implementations), meaning that much of the real work gets done in the individual version


4) adopt after seeing a reasonable number of WG members post "NOT in favour of adoption", on the purported grounds that such expressions of disinterest in adopting the draft by some strange twist of logic are portrayed to point to "interest in discussing the document"

  Geoff