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

["Spencer Dawkins" <[e-mail]>]

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

I applaud the attempt to explain this situation to the community, and can 
only echo that during my years as IESG scribe, this situation does arise 
fairly frequently - I'd guess quarterly, just from memory. So it is nice to 
see the IESG talking to the community, and trying to be proactive, instead 
of waiting until the OBE specification hits Publication Requested and 
everyone freaks out (as the statement says now).

("Always easier to talk about the general case than about $THIS working 
group")

But I also share John's concerns about (inadvertantly?) constraining the 
IESG's ability to use judgement and face the resulting feedback, when the 
Right Thing to Do may not have been anticipated when the IESG made the 
rules.

Most of this statement does NOT use 2119 language, so I was reading the text 
that doesn't use 2119 language as an attempt to explain to the community 
what the IESG is likely to do, and reduce the level of astonishment when the 
situation comes up. I liked that more.

John, if the existing 2119 language went away, and the statement pointed out 
(as you said) that the IESG has always had the authority to do what the 
statement describes, would that help?

I'd also suggest including a sentence that points out the costs of us 
producing and publishing ANYthing - I know that I've talked to a lot of IETF 
people who don't usually think about these costs. That might help the 
community focus when an IESG question about OBE hits the community.

("is this work worth the impact it will have on getting YOUR work through 
the IESG, and the impact it will have on YOUR registration costs?")

Thanks,

Spencer


> Hi.
>
> I largely agree with Harald's comments, which I will not repeat.
>
>
> I do, however, have a concern that he didn't mention (and might
> not agree with).  While I am generally in favor of the IESG's
> telling the community about how it thinks about issues, there is
> a fuzzy boundary between doing that and trying to create more
> and more rules and mechanisms in the hope that those can be
> substituted for careful judgment.  There isn't quite enough
> information in this statement for me to be sure how the IESG
> intends to use it (that is not a complaint), but I fear it will
> lie on the "more rules" rather than "better explanation" side of
> the boundary.
>
> It appears to me that it creates a new category and set of rules
> about that category, but that the criteria for getting something
> into that category are extremely subjective and dependent on
> IESG judgment.  That may be ok, but the IESG has always had the
> authority to shut down WGs because they are not making progress
> or have become irrelevant and has always been able to make
> determinations about the proper classification of documents.
>
> Put differently, I don't understand the problem that this
> document is trying to solve.  Classifying something as OBE
> doesn't move us forward any better than simply identifying what
> is actually going on.  After reading the statement, I have no
> more information about how to identify something as OBE than I
> do about how to identify a WG as not working on anything anyone
> cares about.  The advice to avoid chartering WGs with very long
> running times has been part of the culture for as long as I can
> remember; it is not clear that recommendation in this document
> will make any difference.
>
> I don't seem much difference between the IESG (or an AD) saying
> "this WG is not making any progress on any subject that anyone
> cares about any more" and generating a statement that permits
> identifying a subset of those cases with a specific label.  If
> there is no difference, then this document is useless but
> harmless except insofar as it contributes to a growing pile of
> rules.  On the other hand, if the difference is that classifying
> something in this way constrains the IESG's ability to apply
> good sense and case-by-case analysis to what ought to be done
> with partially-complete WG products, then it could easily be a
> problem rather than a solution to one.
>
> If the real problem is that the IESG has decided that ADs
> cannot, in practice, shut WGs down when people still want to
> work in them, no matter how irrelevant the work has become or
> how little progress the WG is making, I suggest that new
> "statements" and categories won't solve that problem because the
> same folks who would object to the WG being shut down under
> existing rules will object to its being defined as OBE so it can
> be shut down.
>
>     john 


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