Re: Things that used to be clear (was Re: Evolving Documents (nee "Living Documents") side meeting at IETF105.)

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On Jul 5, 2019, at 12:31 PM, Nico Williams <[e-mail]> wrote:
> At IETF we have commitment reviews, naturally, but we only have
> inception reviews for WGs and their initial work items, but no inception
> reviews for subsequent work items, and no interim reviews.

Isn’t a call for adoption an inception review?   If not, it should be.

We actually kind of suck at commitment reviews, in a lot of cases: the work is done, after all, and everybody who thought it was a good idea at adoption time is tired of looking at it.   So it’s not uncommon (and I’ve seen it on documents I’ve finished) that the document is done and polished, and then there’s no response at all to the WGLC.

From a process perspective, I actually consider “adopted -> completed + no objection” to mean that there is WG consensus to publish, because otherwise this phenomenon can easily kill a completed document.   But this is also a process failure in the sense that commitment reviews are important.

The problem the IETF has is that unlike at your former job, there is no way to enforce this process other than by killing documents, and that often only impacts the people who are working on them and the people who would benefit from publication, and not all the people who thought it was a good idea at adoption time, but have wandered off during the course of the work.