Re: [mpowr] WG Formation

[Pete Resnick <[e-mail]>]

On 2/15/04 at 7:55 AM -0800, Dave Crocker wrote:

>>I'm trying really hard to figure out what exactly is gained by not 
>>chartering a group but still letting them start their work, put 
>>them on a list, and expect the IETF-writ-large to start monitoring 
>>and/or working with them.
>
>The difference is quite large. I apologize for not succeeding at 
>making it clear enough.

Maybe I'm being dense, but this message didn't really clear up the 
situation for me. Let me try to ask specific questions.

>First of all, there is no "letting them start".

That I understood. I didn't mean to imply that "letting them start" 
was an active action by the IETF.

>We would not be expending resources on efforts that try to become an 
>IETF working group and only _then_ figure out what the heck they are 
>going to do.

OK, so here's the first one: What resources? Are we talking about all 
that effort that now goes on during charter review? Well, a different 
answer to that is, "Stop spending all of that effort doing 
nit-picking charter reviews." We seem to be doing that so that we can 
have some grand justification to stop working groups from doing bad 
things in the future. There's another tool at our disposal to do 
that, which is to have the AD mercilessly kill the working group if 
it strays.

If you're not talking about charter review, what resources are you 
talking about?

>Second of all, the administrative and management overhead on the 
>IETF is almost zero, which cannot be said for chartered working 
>groups.

What overhead are we talking about here? Secretariat time? IESG time? 
They're certainly going to use the same technical review overhead as 
a chartered working group if they're doing the right thing to get 
chartered in the future, and that seems like the biggest resource 
use. What overhead are you referring to specifically?

>And they get no IETF meeting time.

Neither do working groups if an AD doesn't want them to.

>Since a mailing list is supposed to be the core of working group 
>effort, we should make the ability to operate over a mailing list a 
>pre-condition for working group status.

That I understand.

>>they will float off into the weeds, and they will have invested a 
>>great deal of effort in what will turn out to be useless work 
>>(i.e., the "late surprise"/"not enough early feedback" problem), 
>>which I thought was exactly one of the problems we were trying to 
>>fix.
>
>Well, this is certainly an important concern.  So let's be clear 
>about the suggestion:  It's not that the group should seek IETF 
>formal status when it is nearly done.  It should seek formal status 
>when it has achieved enough coherence to show motivation and focus. 
>For any good group, that is usually very quickly.

OK, but this is starting to sound like, "Form a mailing list and 
demonstrate on that mailing list that you have a clue." That doesn't 
require producing documents or doing a bunch of work prior to 
chartering; it's just demonstrating some ability to have a coherent 
discussion. But do we have lots of examples now of working groups 
that are chartered which have not been having some coherent 
discussions on *some* mailing list, even if that mailing list was not 
dedicated to a particular activity? If a bunch of folks start having 
a coherent discussion on the IETF-SMTP list about some wiz-bang 
extension to SMTP and get a charter together, is there really a need 
to have them go off and have some number of weeks of discussion on a 
new mailing list before we charter the group? Or if an IRTF group 
comes up with a good engineering idea, a proposal for what needs to 
be done, and a group of people on the IRTF list that commit to doing 
the work in the IETF, do we really need another hoop for them to jump 
through?

>there is a difference in the IETF's leverage between a 
>wg-in-formation, versus an already-chartered working group. The 
>former is (or should be) highly motivated to take the initiative of 
>getting itself on a productive vector. The degree to which the 
>latter has to develop that motivation or must be pressured towards 
>it by their AD has proven consistently problematic.

But that sounds like more of a problem with ADs being unwilling to 
pull the rip cord early enough on unmotivated working groups instead 
"pressuring" them to do something, not with the chartering process.

pr
-- 
Pete Resnick <http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
QUALCOMM Incorporated - Direct phone: [phone], Fax: [phone]

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