Re: Cross-area review (was Meeting rotation)

[tom p. <[e-mail]>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian E Carpenter" <[e-mail]>
To: "Andrew Sullivan" <[e-mail]>; <[e-mail]>
Sent: Saturday, December 19, 2015 12:02 AM

> On 19/12/2015 12:36, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> <snip>
> > Finally, there's been a great deal of worry about the lack of
> > cross-area review that we get these days,...
>
> I'd want objective evidence that we get less cross-area review than
> at some date in the past before worrying a great deal. It seems to me
> that we are actually doing it more systematically than in the past.

Brian

I think that we are doing more, in the shape of Directorate, Gen-ART and
such like reviews but that they may not make the I-D better.

Any one operating any sort of system will likely know that change
introduces faults which introduce change which ....   The art is to get
it right first time and when these late stage reviews introduce changes,
then I see the I-Ds getting worse, certainly in terms of the coherence
and consistency of the language, probably in terms of technical accuracy
too.  Outside people suggest new text which makes sense within their
mindset but may not in the context of what the WG has so far produced;
and by this stage, the WG's energy may be waning, so something that may
have
been corrected in a -00 or -01 gets left in in the I-D-(RFC minus one).

The best I-D, in some senses, is often the first to be produced, before
adoption by a WG, but that almost always has to be changed and the
longer that that goes on, commonly years, then the less coherent the I-D
is.  I am thinking particularly of I-Ds that are too large to be held in
one's
mind all at once (which most are).

Tom Petch

> >...  but it doesn't seem to me
> > that the meetings obviously help with that except by accident.
>
> But those accidents - hearing about something by chance that you would
> never discover by chance on-line - are a major part of the advantage
of
> our plenary weeks. Being all in one place and time zone allows those
> useful accidents to happen.
>
>    Brian
>