Re: registries and designated experts (was: Re: APPSDIR review of draft-farrell-decade-ni-07, major design issue (one or two URI schemes))

[SM <[e-mail]>]

Hi Peter,
At 07:19 12-06-2012, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
>By my reading, the "happiana" discussions [1] over the 12+ months have
>led most participants to the conclusion that registration does not imply
>standardization, and that it's not the role of the designated expert to
>act as a gatekeeper with respect to the technical merits of the
>technologies that trigger registration requests. It might be good to
>have a wider discussion about the purpose of registries and the role of
>designated experts, but IMHO it's not correct to conclude that a
>technology is acceptable just because the designated expert didn't
>object to the registrations related to that technology.

I'll +1 the above.

In a recent review the path followed by the draft is Standards Action 
whereas the assignment policy is Expert Review.  Explaining to the 
authors that they should not use the assigned value isn't a 
worthwhile effort given that they have already been through the gate 
to get the value.  The Designated Expert did his job; that is to see 
that the requirements were met instead of acting as gatekeeper.  If 
you reject assignment requests people will find it simpler not to 
register the values.  If you accept the request people might consider 
that the specification is fine.

The reasons provided for managing a namespace are:

   - prevent the hoarding of or unnecessary wasting of values

   - provide a sanity check that the request actually makes sense

   - interoperability issues

The above is at odds with standardization.  The last reason does not 
apply for Expert review.

Regards,
-sm