Re: [BOFChairs] Re: https://chairs.ietf.org/documents/i-d-adoption

[Tim Chown <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

On 14/10/2025, 18:11, "Mirja Kuehlewind (IETF)" <[e-mail]> wrote:

I strongly recommend to do a publicly recorded adoption call if you want to adopt a document, mainly for transparency reasons. The reason why this is not codified as required in rfc2026 is because adoption itself is optional and effectively has no real meaning in the standards process.

For the standards process the only things that counts is that there is consensus to publish at the end (and that needs to be well documented). However, the status of being adopted doesn’t really have any special standing. I would say it's more an orientation for the working group to understand how far a document is in the process and where the focus should be concentrated to.

However, if a chair/wg wants to adopt a document, I think it is on the safe side to run a public call (which I don’t find a lot of overhead). The chairs (only) job is to judge consensus for any wg decision. And if you handle adoption as a wg decision, I think you are better of if you can ensure and “proof" that there is consensus and that everybody had a chance to speak up which is what the call is for.

I agree with all this.

I’d assumed WG adoption was a requirement to progress a document.  One option is to do it in a meeting and record votes by meetecho polls, then confirm, or solicit objections, on the list afterwards.

I certainly find it helps when looking at a WG documents page to know which drafts the WG have agreed should be worked on (even if the content/approach is to be discussed), given anyone can publish anything and see it listed in the WG area as a personal draft.

And I think it’s good that WG chairs prioritise adopted drafts for discussion time at meetings, and tend to not give time to unadopted drafts that have had minimal list discussion.

Tim

My 2c
Mirja



On 14. Oct 2025, at 17:50, Bron Gondwana <brong=[e-mail]> wrote:

I have had an almost zero rate of "adoption call failed" in my working groups - the only time I've proposed something and it hasn't been adopted was when the authors changed their mind and retracted the adoption request!

But I've always done a 2 week call because that's how I cargo-cult learned to do it.

I'd be happy to discuss a more flexible adoption process where for working groups which don't have any issues with too many drafts being proposed or contentious topics coming up.  I'd probably have used that in the past if I'd known it was OK to say "yeah, we all agreed in the in-person call and this seems unlikely to be contentious, let's just adopt it and we can kill it if we discover it's a bad idea during later discussion".  High trust groups would manage that just balance fine.

Bron.

On Tue, Oct 14, 2025, at 11:24, Salz, Rich wrote:
·         I strongly recommend that WG chairs do adoption calls like:
·           "Chairs see support for working on foo-bar.03.  We plan to adopt it.
·           Please post objections by YYYY-MM-DD"

It seems to me that you should only do that if you’re really sure about consensus because otherwise you’ll have to repeat the process.

Attachments:
·         smime.p7s

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