Re: WG Charter Milestones

[Cullen Jennings <[e-mail]>]

On Apr 14, 2011, at 9:43 , Russ Housley wrote:

> IETF WG Chairs:
> 
> During the IESG evaluation of draft-ietf-genarea-charter-tool, the IESG talked about the best way to handle WG charter milestones.  One suggestion is that the IESG completely delegate milestone management to WG chairs.  Is this an idea that WG Chairs would embrace?

Updating dates of milestones or which wg drafts are associated with a milestone seems like a great thing for the chairs to do. 

However, I am not in favor of chairs adding new milestones, or changing the text of existing ones, without AD approval. The WG will make the chair do whatever they hum on, most WGs will hum yes to close every milestone proposed - the net effect with be a loss of any sense of focus in the WG and a peanut butter effect to spreading the energy so thin that each WG milestone takes longer than it currently takes. My view of one of the largest problems at the IETF is that things take too long - adding more milestones will not help.

One of the jobs of the AD is to help prioritize work in an area and get stuff moving. Adding milestones are one of one of the few tools they have to do it. Trying to delegate this to the chairs won't work because the chairs will end up directly or indirectly bound to the hums. If the area disagrees with the ADs prioritization, it's time for a new AD. 

Not to mention the issue of things like the codecs wg chairs might go and add a milestone for a video codec which I 'm sure would create a lot of excitement for the IESG :-)