Re: "why I quit writing internet standards"

[S Moonesamy <[e-mail]>]

Hi Benoit,
At 07:14 17-04-2014, Benoit Claise wrote:
>We discussed during the milestones during one of the last plenaries.

Yes.

>The discussion was around: the milestones are indications and not deadlines.
>In Open Source project, these are deadlines.
>In the IETF, I would love to find a middle ground between the two.
>In the IETF, the only "deadlines" are the meetings, or to be more 
>precise, the submission deadlines just before the meetings.

Lisa used to send monthly progress reports.  It provided some 
visibility into what was happening within the area.

A milestone can be an estimate of when X can be completed.  I might 
suggest one and the group decides whether everyone can target that 
date and plan accordingly.  There are times when deadlines may be 
needed as an effort can end up in failure.

>Exactly, and we should understand why!
>I like this tool: 
><http://www.arkko.com/tools/lifecycle/>http://www.arkko.com/tools/lifecycle/<draft-name>-timing.html
>For example: 
><http://www.arkko.com/tools/lifecycle/draft-ietf-netmod-interfaces-cfg-timing.html>http://www.arkko.com/tools/lifecycle/draft-ietf-netmod-interfaces-cfg-timing.html
>Where is the bottleneck? Is this a process issue? The 
>authors/shepherd/IESG/RFC-editors?
>I don't want to finger point, but understand what we should improve.

Let's see. :-)  The shepherd write-up does not provide me with much 
information.  There's three years from the first -00 to the latest 
version of the draft.  The author activity looks okay.  There is less 
activity from the document shepherd (there is an explanation for 
that).  There was a Last Call in April 2013.  The AD asked for a 
revised I-D in May 2013.  There was another Last Call in December 
2013.  The IESG didn't like something in the draft and it took seven 
months to address that.

There's still the two and a half years.  There are seven months 
between the date in the charter and the first Last Call.  It would 
take some effort to figure out what happened during the first two 
years.  It looks like the working group was the bottleneck.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy