What we need done (Re: first steps (was The other parts of the report...))

--On 12. september 2004 12:19 -0400 John C Klensin <john-ietf@jck.com> 
wrote:

> To further complicate things, I personally don't think the IETF
> has yet figured out enough about what it really wants from the
> secretariat part of the function and reached enough consensus on
> that to justify any RFP-writing.  In this respect, the material
> in The Report seems to me to be inadequate unless the definition
> of what the IETF wants from the secretariat is "whatever the
> IESG or its leadership decide they want on a given day".

permit me to respectfully disagree......

The things that we need done in the "clerk's office" aren't actually that 
novel. It's basic workplan management and document management, for the most 
part. Scale and the responsiveness of participants may be different from 
other organizations - but not THAT different.

And there's a whole lot of things other organizations do (outreach, 
exhibitions, membership management, dues processing) that we simply don't 
do.

Granted, we've grown a thicket of tradition and bizarre quirks over the 
years (for instance, we have archives of old I-Ds, and archive our mailing 
lists, but have no archives of old WG charters), but some of these are 
things that could benefit from a real "why do you need this?" look, and 
others are relatively easily implementable on more-or-less standard 
processing tools (I believe).

I suspect that the only way we can figure out if anyone can figure out what 
we want done from the descriptions we give is to ask them - we don't have 
any experience figuring out what the processes of an organization is, we 
just have experience with living inside this single instance.
(OK, some of us have experience from other orgs too....)

                   Harald

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