Re: Last Call: <draft-arkko-iesg-crossarea-02.txt> (Experiences from Cross-Area Work at the IETF) to Informational RFC

[Peter Saint-Andre <[e-mail]>]

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Hi Jari, although I was asked to complete an AppsDir review of this
document, on reading it several times I realized that my feedback is
more personal and less from the Apps Area perspective, so I am sending
a more general message.

On 2/6/13 4:49 PM, The IESG wrote:
> 
> The IESG has received a request from an individual submitter to
> consider the following document: - 'Experiences from Cross-Area
> Work at the IETF' <draft-arkko-iesg-crossarea-02.txt> as
> Informational RFC

Section 3 begins:

   From an IETF participant's point of view, it is important that there
   is a working group where the technical topic that he or she is
   interested in can be discussed.

I'm not convinced that IETF participants really care whether the
institutional machinery of WG formation has been put in place. In my
experience, a fair amount of interesting work has happened outside of
any WG (e.g., Jeff Hodges and I worked on RFC 6125 on a
special-purpose IETF mailing list, not in a WG). As long as there's
some kind of venue, discussion can occur.

A related note on the following sentence in Section 1:

   If the work is
   interesting, the necessary people come to the meetings and work on
   the specifications.

Well, meetings (in the sense of WG sessions, or even IETF meetings)
aren't truly necessary if there is some other appropriate venue available.

IMHO, Section 2 could benefit from examples of cross-area work
involving RAI and Apps. Current and recent WGs include PRECIS (with
involvement from Apps, RAI, Security, and Ops/Mgt), ALTO (straddling
Apps and Transport), OAUTH (straddling Apps and Security), CORE (in
Apps but with close connections to 6lowpan in Int), PAWS (it was an
open question whether it would end up in Apps or Ops/Mgt), and current
efforts to define multi-stream support in MMUSIC, CLUE, and RTCWEB.
The Apps and RAI AD can probably provide further insight here.

In Section 3:

   Cross-area work is needed,
   of course, in any situation where a particular technical problem does
   not cleanly map to one organization.

Is an IETF area truly an "organization"? Isn't the organization here
the IETF?

In Section 4:

      But it
      is also possible that concerns raised in one forum are not
      understood in another, and this can lead to an effort going
      forward after finding the "lowest bar" forum to take it up.

By "forum" you seem to mean "IETF area".

OLD
      Similarly, requests for cross-area review are relatively
      infrequent or sent only to a particular subset of people in an
      area (such as a directorate).
NEW
      Similarly, requests for cross-area review are relatively
      infrequent or sent only to a particular subset of people in an
      area (such as a directorate or related working group).

I tend to agree with Benoit that the scope of, and audience for, the
suggestions in Section 4 are not particularly clear. Unfortunately, I
do not yet have actionable suggestions for improvement.

Peter

- -- 
Peter Saint-Andre
https://stpeter.im/


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