Re: Appointment of a Transport Area Director

["Eggert, Lars" <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

On Mar 4, 2013, at 15:57, John Leslie <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Eggert, Lars <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>> Especially when technical expertise is delegated to bodies that rely
>> on volunteers.
> 
>   We're _all_ volunteers!

right, but ADs are basically full-time volunteers of whom the community expects a certain timeliness in terms of their actions and decisions. If those actions are delegated to volunteer bodies that feel less strongly about timeliness, the community isn't going to be very happy with the delays, or the review quality is going down (because some don't happen).

>> Don't get me wrong, the work done in the various directorates is
>> awesome, but it's often difficult to get them to apply a uniform
>> measure when reviewing,
> 
>   How important is that, really?

I feel it is important. If some IDs get discusses for a certain problems and others slide under the radar, that's not a great result.

>> and it's also difficult to get them to stick to deadlines. They're
>> volunteers, after all. 
> 
>   I don't think we really "believe in" deadlines.

Really? After all the scribing you've done, surely you know that almost all the IESG reviewing happens on very strict deadlines. Two weeks, and in rare cases a defer adds another two weeks. Reviews not in by that time come too late.

It *is* a challenge to get directorate reviews to appear within that timeframe. When Magnus and me ran the TSV directorate, we tried to schedule directorate reviews during IETF LC, and still quite a number didn't arrive by the IESG telechat date.

>   The General Area is the most obvious place where scaling has hit
> us: the IETF Chair has grown so far beyond full-time that something
> has to give. Russ, I believe, reads Gen-ART reviews, not the original
> documents, and points out areas that rise to DISCUSS level. He asks
> for text to "address" these issues, and tends to clear his DISCUSS
> once the issue is better understood. (I should perhaps note that
> today's IESG has made great progress in trusting each other to put
> significant concerns in RFC Editor notes instead of continuing to
> block documents.)

I think SAAG is a better example. The general area has no technical focus area it's responsible for, and so the reviews are all over the place. (But they are still useful! More eyes help.) But even with the large amount of quality reviewing SAAG is doing, the expertise of the SEC ADs is still crucial. I wouldn't want to only rely on SAAG.

If a "management AD" wanted to substitute directorate expertise for personal expertise, that particular directorate would as a whole need to operate under the timeliness, consistency and quality constraints that a "technical expert AD" would. I simply don't see that happening.

Lars