--On Wednesday, August 31, 2011 11:47 -0400 Keith Moore <mo...@network-heretics.com> wrote:
>... >> IMO, there are two possibilities here. At this point, sadly, >> both involve a chicken-and-egg problem. Such is life. >> >> (1) We proceed as if Proposed Standards are what 2026 (and the >> earlier culture) claims they are and work on ways to reinforce >> that notion in the community. [...] > >> (2) We accept, and effectively encourage, deployment of >> proposed standards in products, either because it is a lost >> cause or because we think it is a good idea. [...] > > Agree with your description of the two possibilities, but I > think the decision of possibility 2 has long since been forced > on us by market expectation and habit. > > We could fix it, perhaps, by drastically changing how we label > our products (dropping the whole notion of "Proposed > Standard", refusing to publish your category 2 documents as > RFCs, etc.). But we can't significantly change market > perception of what "RFC" and "Proposed Standard" mean. Whether we agree on how best to manage a perception change and what it takes, I agree that there is no single magic bullet, much less a painless one. I would turn your comment around slightly and say that a change in names is likely to have little or no effect on perceptions unless we actually change what we do. As I said in and earlier note, there is something of a chicken-and-egg problem here. > while probably Mostly Harmless, won't do a bit of good in the > overall scheme of things) For reasons I've explained in previous notes, I don't think procedural changes, especially from "not followed and doesn't work but ancient" or "contemporary and [still] doesn't work or reflect reality, are harmless ("mostly" or otherwise). >> Remember that, while ignoring procedures and category >> definitions that we don't follow is not desirable, "fixing" >> them to reflect a model that doesn't (and won't) exist either >> is a public demonstration that we are disconnected from >> reality. I'd much rather leave that distinction to some >> other SDOs than join them. YMMD. > > And my assertion is that the model inherent in your > possibility #1 above doesn't exist and won't exist absent from > drastic change. Insisting on high quality for proposed > standards is recognizing current market reality. If you are right, then fussing around with how many maturity levels we have, what criteria we claim we are using, and even how we name things, are dangerous as well as a waste of time and resources. That is where we are maybe in violent agreement -- we either ought to be identifying real problems and fixing them or just staying with what we have until we have the knowledge and will needed to make real changes. In that regard, I applaud one aspect of Jari's note, which is that it affects and IETF administrative procedure and not a fundamental (and unnecessary) procedural change. By contrast, suppose draft-housley-two-maturity-levels were just shelved for a while and replaced by an announcement by an AD or two (ideally from areas that have really low advancement rates even as compared to the already-low IETF average) that they intended to (i) accept a public assertion of interoperability as an implementation report, issue an IETF LC for DS to see if anyone with real experience with the protocol objects loudly, and then move to advance the document, and (ii) that they would construe the passage of the relevant number of month and public claims of deployment as sufficient incentive to issue an IETF LC for advancement to IS. If the rest of the IESG were willing to go along with that, we'd have a real experiment without permanent changes to the official procedures. People who saw a problem advancing a particular protocol or document could object and it would presumably work only for PS documents that were of high quality. If it worked out, we would have a basis for coming back and evaluating whether there really was enough of a difference between DS and IS to be worth the trouble and whether the practical differences between that sort of implementation report and today's interpretation of what is required was. And then we could take ...two-maturity-levels back up with some confidence about both utility and potential harm. And, if you are right and this is all hopeless without really major changes, then that experiment might give us the information needed to finally come to grips with that and either make the major change or accept the status quo and stop spending energy trying to turn the knobs a degree or two. > And I'm not one of those people who believes that market > perceptions are inherently unchangeable. But expecting the > market to change how it interprets our documents without us > bothering to significantly change how we present them to the > public - THAT would indeed be a serious disconnect from > reality. I actually agree. john _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf