Re: [Int-area] intarea charter

["David Harrington" <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

In the OPS area, we did such a split. We now have OPS area sessions,
and an OPS area WG (opsawg wg).

The OPS area meetings are still important for listening to new ideas
related to operations and management, including educational
presentations from other areas in the IETF (the OAM soup started in
OPS area meeting), and ideas at the border between research and
standards engineering ("green" management for monitoring temperatures
and controlling power in routers and data centers).

The opsawg WG drafts have been important to the OPS **area**, and
include efforts in 
1) cross-SDO education/coordination: documenting how IETF "Operations
and Management" and OAM in other SDOs (especially MPLS-TP) differ, in
"The OAM Acronym Soup", and standardizing ITU-T-compatible alarm
reporting categories (critical, emergency, etc.) for syslog. 
2) IETF-wide education: Informational documents describing how to
approach operations and management support in IETF protocol efforts,
such as the "Guidelines for Operability and Manageability", and a
"Survey of IETF Standards-track Management Protocols". 
3) cross-WG coordination: coordination between different management
protocols, such as syslog to snmp trap translation, and MIB datatypes
to XML datatypes. 

I doubt the OPS area would have published many of these important
documents without having a WG for OPS-area document preparation. Most
of these documents would not have been considered focused enough to
warrant a WG. Cross-protocol efforts would not be considered high
enough priority versus other protocol features for existing
protocol-specific WGs to address, despite the recognized operational
difficulties of integrating management.

There is a danger the WG could become a forum for advancing individual
drafts that the community has little interest in, but so far it has
not. I think the chairs and the WG need to ensure it does not.

David Harrington
[e-mail]
[e-mail]
[e-mail]


> -----Original Message-----
> From: [e-mail] 
> [mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of Mark Townsley
> Sent: Tuesday, October 13, 2009 1:17 AM
> To: Jari Arkko
> Cc: Internet Area
> Subject: Re: [Int-area] intarea charter
> 
> Jari Arkko wrote:
> > Marcelo,
> >
> >> My main concern is that since by definition, the scope is loosely

> >> defined, we may end up collecting documents that have 
> little interest 
> >> (i.e. there were not enough interest to form a WG for instance,
as 
> >> opposed to what i understand the goal is, to work on 
> documents that 
> >> there is interest but don't have a clear home).
> >>
> >> So, i think having a WG is fine, but it is very important 
> to properly 
> >> measure the interest on working on each document adopted, since
we 
> >> may end up having a collection of one man efforts in this
context.
> >
> > I fully agree that the group should only work on topics 
> that do have 
> > general interest. We intend to be strict about adopting 
> work. I also 
> > believe that we've been historically strict; here are the
documents 
> > that I can recall we handled over the last four years: RFC 
> 4727 (IANA 
> > experimental values for IP), RFC 4843 (IPv6 KHIs), RFC 4884 
> (extended 
> > ICMPs), RFC 5227 (IPv4 DAD), RFC 5350 (router alert IANA rules), 
> > draft-atlas-icmp-unnumbered, draft-touch-intarea-tunnels, 
> > draft-touch-ipv4-unique-id and I don't quite remember where 
> RFCs 4581 
> > and 4982 (bug fixes to SEND specifications) were developed, 
> but there 
> > was some discussion on our list at least.
> Part of the past strictness, I think, has been that with two 
> overworked 
> ADs as the unofficial WG chairs of the unofficial WG, there was a 
> natural squelching point for taking on new work.
> 
> I definitely see the possibility of feature creep here if we make
the 
> group official and bring on additional management bandwidth. 
> One of the 
> reasons Margaret and I started the intarea meeting to begin 
> with is that 
> we wanted more cohesiveness and understanding of what was going on 
> across the intarea by everyone. I would not like to see that mission

> taken over by the new WG becoming more focused on document 
> advancement 
> than a forum to get updates on what is going on in different places.
> 
> The slippery slope here is what has already happened in other areas 
> where the "Area WG" meeting is actually separate from the "Area Open

> Meeting"  - perhaps that's where we are inevitably headed.
> 
> I'm not opposed to this change, but I don't want to see the original

> mission lost in the process, or the WG becoming a home for lost work

> items of little interest to the community.
> 
> - Mark
> >
> > This group is definitely not the place to adopt work that, e.g., 
> > failed to gain support elsewhere or is just something that one 
> > individual wants to do. I will add some words to the 
> charter to make 
> > this clearer.
> >
> > In short, just because we intend to formalize the existence 
> of the WG, 
> > it does not follow that we will take on large numbers of 
> drafts in the 
> > program. The group has a dual nature. But it is first and 
> foremost a 
> > discussion forum for area-wide topics, not an RFC publication
venue 
> > for new things even if publish a document now and then.
> >
> > Jari
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Int-area mailing list
> > [e-mail]
> > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/int-area
> >
> 
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