--On Monday, 15 January, 2007 09:26 -0800 Dave Crocker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> In the current model, any follow-on discussion really is > between the Design Team and Chairs, with the AD. This > introduces the possibility of significant late-stage changes > that are agreed to by a smaller set than the whole working > group. Even for items that are then returned to the wg, the > wg cannot see the basis for the proposed changes; worse, > having this all be late-stage, along with the added delay > during the effort to resolve the Discuss, stands a good chance > of resulting in less careful inspection by wg members > interested in expediting closure. Dave, FWIW, I am, and have always been, much more concerned with this particular problem of having post-Last Call issue resolution turn into a private negotiation among a small number of actors, with the WG essentially uninvolved and unaware, as the most serious late-stage threat to quality of our output. The rest of the issues about DISCUSS generation and tracking are, indeed, troublesome. But I believe that, in the vast majority of cases, they eventually get sorted out, even though they may waste time and otherwise not be efficient. I don't want to minimize the impact of that loss of time, but the private negotiations are, IMO, what put us at risk of producing documents that really do not represent IETF consensus (or, in the worst cases, even WG consensus). I also wonder, as we fine-tune notification to WGs about Last Call comments, what we should be doing about documents that are individually submitted to the IESG (or generated by the IESG) for publication (on the Standards Track or otherwise). The question is complicated by the observation that many WGs have multiple work items. Someone with particular expertise that overlaps one or two of them might want to track relevant Last Calls closely, but would be unlikely to subscribe to the WG list to do so. Perhaps we should make it a requirement that any document that is Last Called must be associated with a mailing list, perhaps one whose duration is limited to the Last Call period and any follow-ups until the document is either published or finally rejected. If there were a WG, then the WG list should be a proper subset of that list, anyone commenting during the Last Call should be added to it, and others could be added on request. That is just a quick idea and is probably not the right one, but I am concerned that we are in danger of optimizing for one case --the WG with either a single task item or a set of _very_ closely related ones-- and accidentally pessimizing the other cases. john _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf