Re: Evolving Documents (nee "Living Documents") side meeting at IETF105.)

[Christopher Morrow <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Jul 18, 2019 at 11:58 PM Joel M. Halpern <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> (Supporting Keith on this.)
>
> One of the key benefits of IETF meetings is cross-area review.  One of
> the key reasons for having WG last call is the observed need for review
> outside the working group.  One of the observation from many such
> reviews is that it is amazing how much a working group can miss while
> getting its core stuff right.
> Yes, this also means that periodically folks raise objections that are
> spurious, miss the point, or have been addressed already.  But the cost
> of not having the review is VErY high.
>

Is this cost really when there is a 'published standard which vendors
are expected to write code to support'
or also for: "Hey we operate things like this, wait not like that
anymore... now we do it this way!"

My experience is that often the operations focused work items get
strung along and nibbled to death by tiny ducks... to the point that
by the time the document sees the light of day it's OBE :( This is
disheartening to the authors... They're goal wasn't really 'publish an
rfc!' but to make a best practice more accessible to others.

> Yes, folks have suggested that the review should be lightened or
> eliminated.  So far, the community has refused to do that.  And I for

err, but this is what the LD path is actually doing. There's no reason
that the document can't get reviewed by folk outside the WG
responsible for taking care of it... in fact it can get published and
reviewed (and revised!) as often as is necessary. That seems like a
great step forward for a bunch of ops related work.

> one am very glad that is so.  In spite of having had to deal with some
> frustrating objections in many cases.
>
> Yours,
> Joel
>
> On 7/18/2019 10:10 PM, Keith Moore wrote:
> >
> >
> > Sent from my iPhone
> >
> > On Jul 18, 2019, at 10:00 PM, Ted Lemon <[e-mail]
> > <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
> >
> >> On Jul 18, 2019, at 9:50 PM, Keith Moore <[e-mail]
> >> <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
> >>> Yes, and I’ve repeatedly said I could see optimizing in corner
> >>> cases..  But I think it’s a rare WG that doesn’t have any potential
> >>> to adversely affect other interests.
> >>
> >> Another way to look at this is a well-known cognitive bias: “I am
> >> right.”   If you look at what a working group is doing and don’t
> >> understand it, there is a tendency to think they don’t know what they
> >> are doing, and that you know what they should have done.   This bias
> >> is frequently wrong, and I’ve seen it turned against good work
> >> numerous times.
> >
> > That argument applies equally well to itself.
> >
> > This is silly.  I’ve lost count of the number of WGs I’ve seen for which
> > I did understand what they were doing, and did understand how they could
> > harm other interests.  And in general Last Call is too late to fix those
> > problems.  I agree with Brian that that’s not a description of _every_
> > WG, for the reasons he stated.  But as long as we’re talking about
> > process in general, the discussion needs to consider the potential for
> > tussles and how to manage that.
>