Re: [Rfced-future] [rfc-i] RSWG & AUTH48 (was Re: [admin-discuss] Public archival of AUTH48 communications)

[Lars Eggert <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

neither of the two concerns below motivated the proposal by the IESG to make the AUTH48 discussions public. The motivation was to further increase transparency of our processes.

On 2022-3-4, at 5:07, John C Klensin <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Concern 1: There is a suspicion that something nefarious is
> going on.

The IESG doesn't have this suspicion, and I'd be surprised to learn that a significant part of the community has this suspicion, given that is extremely rare for any individual AUTH48 to result in any significant discussion.

> 	Plausible solution: Make the correspondence public
> 	either in real time or on request later. (Not a perfect
> 	solution, see "observation" below.)

The motivation for making AUTH48 discussions public is solely that AUTH48 is AFAICT the only remaining step in the standardization process where private discussions are still being held (albeit only on editorial questions), and the IESG wanted to further increase transparency here.

> Concern 2: The AUTH48 reviewers lack breadth or are sufficiently
> invested in one vision of the document to not be able to
> reliably make good critical decisions consistent with consensus
> of the Stream/ Approving body.   Using the IETF Stream as an
> example, with no malice at all, inconsistency between the views
> of the community and those of the authors and IESG could be
> another part of this concern.

This is not a concern for the IESG. We have seen no evidence that the AUTH48 step is somehow systemically broken. (It does often take longer than 48 hours - but that has been the case for decades.)

> 	Plausible solution:  Figure out a better way to allow
> 	broader review immediately pre-publication.

This is explicitly a non-goal. The conversation in AUTH48 is intended to remain between the authors/editors and the RPC, with ADs in the loop. It is not intended to morph into some sort of post-approval community last call.

Thanks,
Lars

> Observation: those two concerns are not mutually exclusive and
> neither are the plausible solutions.  And the weakness in the
> proposed solution to Concern 1 is that, if there is information
> about the reason to make one seemingly equivalent choice over
> another that should not be generally discussed or, if someone
> actually and intentionally wanted to do something nefarious, the
> proposal would allow either to be kept out of the public record,
> with no way to tell them apart.   Because of the first case,
> forcing all AUTH48 correspondence to be public might easily
> result in lower-quality documents.
> 
>    best,
>    john
> 
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