Re: Cross-area review (was Meeting rotation)

[Jari Arkko <[e-mail]>]

> Instead we should understand that we cannot and should not try to demand or expect documents that are perfect.  We should demand 'good enough' and let the outside world evaluate and feed the results back to us.

One view is that we already are in that mode. I don’t think any reasonable person could claim that any specification from a standards body of any sort is perfect, including from the IETF. More interestingly, the question is whether our community, directorate, and IESG reviews and associated practices reach the ‘good enough’ level or under- or overshoot. But one person’s egregiously unnecessary fine-tuning is another person’s major threat to the Internet.

Personal opinion: we overdo it, a lot of the time.

But I think we are agreeing that we actually shoot for ‘good enough’ but do too little follow-up and revision. I could cite many counter examples where that follow-up does happen. But in many cases there is no follow-up. Why is that? Specification turned out to be uninteresting, so need to follow-up? Close enough, no business need to waste time to get to perfection? Remaining details hammered out in interops, code already runs, no need to revise? Aside from the few errata, no need for bigger changes? Worst specs are revised others are good enough? IETF process too complicated for the update? Probably a mixture of these reasons.

Jari