Re: Please Review Draft IESG Statement on Activities that are OBE

[Jari Arkko <[e-mail]>]

John,

> ... a large fraction of the
> community (probably a majority) had concluded that TCP/IP was
> OBE.  ...
> ... we would have shut down
> (or never started) any work on XMPP ...

Right.

You also wrote in another mail:

> I do, however, have a concern that he didn't mention (and might
> not agree with).  While I am generally in favor of the IESG's
> telling the community about how it thinks about issues, there is
> a fuzzy boundary between doing that and trying to create more
> and more rules and mechanisms in the hope that those can be
> substituted for careful judgment.  There isn't quite enough
> information in this statement for me to be sure how the IESG
> intends to use it (that is not a complaint), but I fear it will
> lie on the "more rules" rather than "better explanation" side of
> the boundary.  
>   

That is something that I also care about. Note that the statement says 
almost nothing about the real reasons for being OBE; the IESG and the 
community need to apply judgment in making such decisions.

For instance, what is a "non-problem"? We have to be very careful about 
that. For instance, I think it would be inappropriate to declare an 
application as something addressing a non-problem when its only used by 
a small number of people. Its hard to predict usage patterns, and what 
seems to be "winning" right now may be dead tomorrow, and vice versa. A 
far more workable rule for continuing IETF work is whether the group 
actually invests cycles in it, progresses specifications, produces 
technically sound solutions, has running code, and so on. Even the most 
non-OBE WG may have to be terminated, if no one is doing work.

But where these decisions get difficult is when the different indicators 
give you a different answer. For instance, if you have an active WG that 
has half a dozen implementations and is making progress with its 
specifications, but everyone else in the IETF believes we do not need 
it, the WG has hard remaining issues in its specifications, or that the 
results may even be harmful in some context. There is no easy answer in 
such cases.

Jari