Re: Cost vs. Benefit of Real-Time Applications and Infrastucture Area

On 9/21/05 1:25 AM, "David Kessens" <david.kessens@nokia.com> wrote:
> I would have a lot less trouble with the proposal of adding an area if
> we would be able to find another one that could be abolished, or
> reorganize ourselves in some way or form that would result in no net
> addition of Area Directors.

I suspect that this ties to the general technical problem of
it often being unclear what someone means by "scaling."  Something
that scales well in one direction may scale very badly in another,
and this is probably one of those cases.  Rather than focusing
exclusively on the problems introduced by growing the IESG we also
need to discuss the problems introduced by not growing the IESG,
which as someone pointed out include having a large number of working
groups per AD.  That's a scaling problem, too.  I think it generally
works well to have the two ADs in a given area have differing broad
interests, but I think there's got to be a limit on how large the
gap is between their areas of specialization (there does need to
be some overlap) and the gap between network transport issues and
multimedia application signaling issues really is enormous.

There's a structural problem here.  A lot of what's going on
in the Transport Area today simply isn't transport.  Of course RTP
is a transport protocol, but SIP and RTSP and so on simply are not,
and I think the work required to move those along is too demanding
to consider them ancillary to transport (as emergency services
would be to the new proposed area).  If the same people are to remain
responsible for the technical and administrative shepherding of both
TCP and telephony signaling, then perhaps it should be the case that
we get rid of the area concept entirely, have a fixed size IESG, and
have the IESG members be responsible for working groups based on personal
interest or obligation or the roll of a 13-sided die.

Melinda

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