Re: Last Call: <draft-hoffman-tao4677bis-15.txt> (The Tao of IETF: A Novice's Guide to the Internet Engineering Task Force) to Informational RFC

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Wednesday, May 30, 2012 15:56 -0700 The IESG
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> The IESG has received a request from an individual submitter
> to consider the following document:
> - 'The Tao of IETF: A Novice's Guide to the Internet
> Engineering Task    Force'
>   <draft-hoffman-tao4677bis-15.txt> as Informational RFC
> 
> The Tao of the IETF has grown a bit stale.  For example, many
> of the tasks that were requested by email are now done with
> online tools, completely avoiding manual intervention by the
> Secretariat.  This is an effort to refresh the document.

I'd like to move this discussion up a level from discussions
about the present state of the text.  

The community has concluded several times that certain types of
documents are better handled as web pages (wiki or otherwise),
by published "statements", or even as permanent I-Ds, rather
than as archival RFCs.  Examples include the "Internet Official
Protocol Standards" sequence, the "Requests for Comments
Summary", the "Instructions to RFC Authors", procedures of the
IAOC and other bodies, and a series of IESG statements.  

I've argued that we use RFCs for anything of normative
significance, even when the only marginal value the RFC provides
is a good time-stamped snapshot (and sometimes lost those
arguments).  But this is an Informational document merely
provides advice, general guidance about procedures, and pointers
to the real specifications.

I suggest that, if anything is stale, it is RFC 4677, not the
rolling I-D updates that Paul has been maintaining from time to
time.  I haven't pointed a newcomer to the IETF to the RFC,
rather than the current I-D, for years.  I assume that others
have done similarly.

Assuming Paul isn't planning to get this published as an RFC and
then immediately retire from the IETF and that we don't have a
delusion that this document will not need to be maintained and
updated as things change, I propose the following:

(1) Establish the Tao as a modified Wiki, complete with live
HTML links to relevant documents and other relevant
discussions.. Provide some mechanism for comments to the editor
or even discussion that works better than the RFC Errata
process.  Turn maintenance of that page over to a volunteer or
two (ideally someone young enough to learn a lot from the
process) or the Secretariat.   Before someone says "cost",
please calculate the costs to the community of an extended Last
Call in which people debate details of wording.

(2) Appoint Paul as chair of an editorial committee with zero or
more additional members to be appointed at his discretion
subject to advice and consent of the IESG.  That committee gets
to consider whether to make changes.  If they get it wrong, they
are subject to the community's normal forms of abuse and, in
principle, appeals.  That could add a bit of work for the IESG
but I suggest only a bit and less than running a Last Call.

(3) Replace/ obsolete RFC 4677 by a document modeled on RFC
5000.  I.e., it should explain why we are maintaining the Tao as
one or more web pages and should provide a durable pointer to
how the web page can be found.

just my opinion,
   john