Re: Question about pre-meeting document posting deadlines for the IESG and the community

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 16. Mar 2024, at 15:05, Jan-Frederik Rieckers <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Since I'm relatively new - what was the "-00 special" that Carsten mentioned?

There was a time when the deadline for -00 drafts was a week (?) before the one for all follow-on drafts.

I forget the rationale — maybe it was that a new thing (a -00) would take longer to digest than an update (-nn where nn > 00).

In any case, the actual change in behavior wasn’t so much that people posted their drafts a week earlier; people just posted a placeholder draft as -00 and had another week to do the -01 that would be the actual input to the meeting.

I think this example serves us as a reminder that it is less important what we are trying to achieve with a change, compared with what the resulting change of behavior will be.  It is not enough to mean good, it is the actual outcome that counts.

Someone (sorry) proposed making the I-D deadline a per-working-group decision.

I can disclose that many of the process rules that we enjoy are actually meant to give leadership (here, the working group chairs) a stick to get some desirable behavior out of the participants, and the creation of a “Sachzwang” (untranslatable German bureaucrat-speak, maybe “force of circumstance”) is one of the best ways to give WG chairs that stick,

Of course, some will ask why working groups should be punished that don’t want to have that deadline.
(First of all, we could actually make it less of an exception to have AD-approved secretariat-posted I-Ds for WGs that deliberately make it part of their process.  I have used this workaround to good effect when there actually was a reason.  Talk to your AD!  Ahead of time.)

But to most of the WG chairs I would say: You are holding it wrong (the stick).

Of course, the chairs can decide to give agenda time to drafts that are on a git forge such as GitHub only (or, worse, in some random personal web space — don’t allow that).
Setting the expectations right is the important thing.
The current times (close 2 weeks before, open 1 day before) are exactly what is needed in a good number of cases, and their consistency helps people who want to do work across WGs.

Communicate what behavior you want from your WG draft authors (“editors”) and from the producers of new stuff. The standard timing will give you the right thing in most of the cases, and your AD is there to help with the exceptions.

Grüße, Carsten