[RAI] Document states

[Gonzalo Camarillo <[e-mail]>]

Folks,

based on my conversations with many of you and the questions I usually
get, most people are not familiar with the process documents follow
since the leave their WG (the chairs request the publication of the
document) until the document gets published as an RFC. For most people,
this process seems to be like a black box. Most people would like to
know how they can help progress documents more efficiently when the
document is in different states within the process.

The following draft contains useful information on the states documents
can have:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-proto-wgdocument-states/

In short, when the chairs request the publication of a draft, the draft
is first reviewed by the AD responsible for the WG. Then, the draft will
be reviewed by the whole IETF community during its IETC LC. Finally, the
draft will be reviewed by the IESG.

While having authors respond to questions in a timely manner is always
important, it is specially important in the IETF LC and IESG review
stages. This is because you are going to be dealing with reviewers
outside your WG who do not have the context to understand the draft
permanently in their heads. If a reviewer asks a question and the author
does not answer quickly enough, the reviewer will have to reconstruct
all that context information when he or she eventually gets a
response... as you can imagine, this slows things down a lot. So,
please, be responsive and do not let that type of context information
timeout.

If you are interested in the state a particular draft is in at a
particular point, just check the tracker. We try and keep the tracker up
to date.

Cheers,

Gonzalo