> I wasn't advocating for more ADs, but for more 'virtual' ADs, i.e., to > move the work of reviewing out of the ADs, and let the ADs distrbute the > reviews and collect and interpret the results.
This is _more_ work for the ADs, not less, because the ADs have to read the reviews in addition to the documents. You might ask why the ADs' reviews are better than the virtual ADs' reviews. It's not inherently the case, of course, but the "real" ADs will be exposed to more information that informs such reviews, and the "real" ADs are in a better position to work out technical compromises that helps keep different protocols from fighting with one another. (for instance, keeping linklocal addressing or site-local addressing from doing harm to application-level interoperability). What you are advocating would help if the majority of documents presented to IESG were not close to being acceptable for standards track. But that's not the case. The majority of documents are close to being acceptable - maybe 10% are not close. But it can take a lot of work for those documents that are "close" to be made acceptable. Some of the work required to craft technical compromises could perhaps be offloaded to virtual ADs. And when you have truly non-controversial documents that don't require cross-area review you can offload those reviews. But the IESG still needs to know what is in the document before it can make a determination as to whether cross-area review is necessary, and you can't really ask (say) a layer 3 person to make a determination as to whether this protocol will affect layer 7 concerns - particularly when layer 7 concerns are so diverse. There's also the problem of how to provide incentives for those virtual ADs. The Apps area had a directorate for many years with the idea that some reviews could be offloaded to the directorate. It didn't work very well, because those people were busy too, and it was hard to find people who could reliably turn around a review of a difficult document in time for the IESG telechat. They could (and did!) review the short/easy/noncontroversial documents, but there aren't that many of them, and they're not the ones that take up all of an AD's time. (Aside: I really do think that a limit on the number of documents, and a page limit on normative technical specifications, might go a long way toward lessening AD workload and also helping WGs produce well-written specifications. But there would need to be some way of making exceptions, as there will be a few documents that really do need to be long.) > > 2. if the work being done has too much effort on the wrong tasks, it does > > not > > help things to have more people doing the wrong things. > > I agree on this; IMO, if the ADs spend too much time reviewing, then > that's self-correcting - review less. I've never understood the 'review' > portion of this; I do understand the coordination with the IETF, but the > review is supposed to happen at the lower levels inside the WGs. In my entire time in IETF, it's never worked that way. Nor can I understand how it could work that way and produce reasonable output. WGs are too focused on their immediate goals to think about the wider impact of their work, and they tend to interpret difficult technical requirements in such a way as to make them seem conveniently irrelevant. It's easier to ignore problems than to solve them; it's easier to design a protocol that only works in a limited set of conditions than to design one that works on the global Internet. Again - if you want to lower IESG workload, figure out how to encourage WGs to produce shorter and better quality output. Keith _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
