I've only heard secondhand about the activities in the sub-ip area and so I can't offer direct feedback. However, in <http://www.ietf.org//mail-archive/ietf/Current/msg18130.html>, John Klensin makes the following point:
(4) There is a class of WG for which the "bounded outcome" model will, fairly clearly, fail. And, unfortunately, such WGs seem to be on the increase. It has become common to have a situation in which a group of people with narrowly-focused interests come together and insist, quite loudly and persistently, that they want to do a particular piece of work within the IETF. Such groups are often approved by the IESG: whether to give them a chance, or because turning them down is too painful, or because the work might actually be useful. But, unless we can devise rules that prevent such groups from being chartered, or that kill them immediately if they cannot involve a broad spectrum of the IETF community in their work (and involve them actively), then presuming that their output represents community approval, is extremely dangerous to the goal of producing only IETF protocols that are competent on the public Internet. My observations of such groups is that it is often difficult or impossible to get them to focus on even the applicability (or security or scaling) boundaries of their work; it is difficult to hold the time delays that occur when the IESG identifies and tries to remedy those problems in order to produce a competent, or competently-bounded and documented, protocol as an IESG failure because of excessive processing time. I would like the IESG to consider if the work in the sub-ip area could be considered to meet the description above and, if so, whether it is endemic to the area. (I can easily imagine this is so, although, as I say above, I have no facts to back this up.) If sub-ip represents technologies that don't, and will never, get involvement from a "broad spectrum of the IETF community," we shouldn't institutionalize it. In this case, I would be in favor of letting the area expire when the working groups complete their current charters (option 3). --aaron
