Re: Thought experiment [Re: Quality of Directorate reviews]

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 11/7/19 8:31 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:

> Anyway: my new experiment would be one that the IESG could decide to
> start tomorrow. It's simply that the IESG would only ever issue one form
> of DISCUSS ballot, which would look like this:
>
> Pat Areadirector has entered the following ballot position for
> draft-ietf-somewg-somedraft-99: Discuss
> ....
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> DISCUSS:
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> There are still open issues from the following reviews:
> <links to reviews>
>
> In other words, the IESG simply busy-waits until all review issues
> have been resolved, rather than finding and fixing the issues
> personally.
>
> (If an AD wishes to post a review for a given draft, that would be
> a personal choice, not part of the IESG workload.)
>
> This is a procedural change, and would not prevent a substantive
> DISCUSS in unusual circumstances.

To me the problems seem like: (a) getting sufficient reviews done, and 
(b) establishing review criteria well in advance, not only for the 
reviewers but also as feed-forward to the WG and document editors.  (not 
that reviewers couldn't identify issues outside of those criteria, but 
having a somewhat-shared view of those criteria would make it easier to 
compare different reviews for example)

I keep looking for ways to identify these criteria earlier in the 
process.   Not that there would never be last-minute showstoppers - 
we're always learning new things.   But if we could reduce the number of 
late surprises that would make everything easier IMO.

Keith