Re: Observations on (non-technical) changes affecting IETF operations

[Melinda Shore <[e-mail]>]

On 3/27/16 3:33 AM, Russ White wrote:
> We've lost the art of base spec -- leave other stuff to later. Maybe I'm
> just being nostalgic, but I seem to remember a time when we would pass
> through a base protocol with extensibility, and then start talking about
> extensions on a case by case basis. Now we seem to see 15-20 drafts proposed
> in a few months, all with interlocking bits and pieces, totaling hundreds of
> pages of text, and sounding more like a bill being presented before some
> legislative body rather than a technical specification.

Yes, this is definitely a problem.  Sometimes it's
necessary to grind out metadocuments, when participants
refuse to come to agreement.  But more often this seems
related to a bigger problem, which is that we've got a
bunch of participants who are being given incentives to
publish documents rather than to produce technology.

Someone once told me that he'd implemented an important
piece of IETF technology and that while there were five
or six documents in the core set, he really only needed
two of them to produce a full implementation.

We're running into this issue (completeness before core spec
publication) in a working group I chair and we really don't
have mechanisms to push on past someone really determined
to do this.  In fairness, it's produced a better core
specification, but in honesty it hasn't produced a core
specification that's sufficiently better to justify the
consequent delay (over a year, I'd guess).

As with so many things this can be a chairing issue -
maybe we need to come up with a clearer shared understanding
of what "ready" is, and make sure the IESG shares it as well.
And, be prepared to deal with appeals from participants who
are bound and determined to make perfection be the enemy of
the good enough.

Melinda