Re: Question about pre-meeting document posting deadlines for the IESG and the community

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 16. Mar 2024, at 06:59, Benoit Claise <benoit.claise=[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>> 1. Negative: A ridiculously large number of drafts are posted within
>> ~72 hours, as Carsten pointed out recently**. So anybody who tries to
>> track the IETF very broadly is swamped three times a year.

See below.

>> 2. Positive: People are deadline-driven. If we didn't have the deadline
>> two weeks before the meeting, the ridiculous number of drafts would
>> be posted... today!

This.

> Let's add a third effect.
> 3. The IETF hackathon positive effect. People start meeting on Sat/Sun before the IETF week, discussing the different open issues, ideally around code development. Some issues are potentially solved during the week-end, leading to new draft revisions being posted, as prerequisite for the WG discussion. If not posted as a new draft revision, the WG slide deck will anyway contain the hackathon findings (which has the same positive effect)

Right.  Also, people *do* read drafts in the 2-week interval, and make comments, and lead discussions (hey, we have *interims* in these two weeks!  You should try that.).
Should we not process these comments before the meeting?  That would be extremely counterproductive.

I think this discussion should be fact-based, not principle-based.
I happen to work in WGs where the I-D deadline works really well.
It may not work well in your WG, but complain to your WG management, please.

Clearly, git adds to our productivity, and disabling some of its positive effects (PRs that can be discussed based on actual text instead of vague slideware and good feelings) would be, er, I’ll save the adjective here.

The meeting is a natural deadline, and creating another one two weeks before the meeting has worked out overwhelmingly useful (in particular since the -00 special went away).  

Please don’t try to “fix” (break) what isn’t broken.

Grüße, Carsten