Subject: [apps-discuss] Proposal to form an Apps Area-wide Working Group

From: Alexey Melnikov <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:36:28 +0100

Hi,

Your Applications Area Directors have been thinking about the 
possibility of forming an area-wide working group similar to those for 
the internet (INTAREA), routing (RTGWG), transport (TSVWG), and 
operations (OPSAWG) areas. Here is our motivation for doing that:

Problem Statement: Applications ADs receive a big number of individual 
submissions not related to any of the Apps WG or explicitly out of scope 
for them. In many cases documents would benefit from wider review, 
however creation of new WGs might be too heavyweight to deal with such 
documents. Also, historically sponsoring an individual submissions 
caused more troubles for sponsoring ADs (and thus consumed more AD time 
as a result) than sponsoring WG documents. This is partially due to the 
time spent finding the right reviewers and dealing with IETF LC feedback 
in presence of "lack of consensus" claims. So Apps ADs are basically 
stuck between asking for a BOF/WG creation (i.e. pushing all work for 
the authors/editors), refusing to sponsor publication of a document and 
sponsoring individual submissions.

Your Applications AD are thinking that it would be useful to have 
another tool in our toolbox, such as the Area-wide WG. Note, that there 
is no intention to deprecate use of individual submissions, or to 
require that all individual submissions go through this new WG.

At the IESG retreat in May we received input from our fellow ADs 
regarding best practices for such groups, and as a result we have 
created a draft charter for discussion in Maastricht.

We realize that forming an area-wide working group is not a step to be 
taken lightly, so we would appreciate it if folks on this list could 
review and think about the draft charter between now and IETF 78, then 
come to the Apps Area Open Meeting on Monday morning with your ideas, 
criticisms, and suggestions for improvement.

We would appreciate if people delay posting comments on this subject 
until after the Apps Area meeting in Maastricht (on July 26th). But 
private comments to Peter and myself about whether you think this is a 
stupid or a good idea would always be appreciated.

Best Regards,
Peter and Alexey

Applications Area Working Group (APPSAWG)

The Applications Area sometimes receives proposals for the development
of specifications dealing with application-related topics that are 
not in scope for an existing working group and do not justify the 
formation of a new working group.

The Applications Area Working Group (APPSAWG) serves as a forum for such 
work in the IETF.  The APPSAWG accepts work items in accordance with the 
consensus of the group and the best judgment of the Applications Area 
Directors, who are responsible for updating the working group milestones 
as needed.  The working group meets if there are active proposals that 
require intensive discussion.

Work items that are appropriate for the APPSAWG mostly fall under the 
following topics:

(A) Well-defined security issues that are relevant to multiple
application technologies (e.g., draft-saintandre-tls-server-id-check).

(B) Small-scale additions to the protocol stack for HTTP and other
application technologies, mostly related to service discovery and
meta-data (e.g., RFC 5785, draft-nottingham-http-link-header, and
draft-hammer-hostmeta).

(C) Selected other work items addressing topics that historically fall
within the Applications Area, such as calendaring, date and time 
formats, FTP, HTTP, internationalization, language tags, MIME, URIs, 
URNs, and XML.

When considering whether to accept a proposed work item, the APPSAWG and 
the Applications Area Directors shall take into account the following 
factors, among others:

(1) Whether the WG has consensus on the suitability, importance, and 
projected quality of the proposed work item. 

(2) Whether there is core team of WG participants with sufficient energy
and expertise to advance the proposed work item according to the proposed 
schedule. 

(3) Whether there are enough WG participants who are willing to review
the work produced by the document authors or editors.

(4) Whether the Area Directors judge that wider input is needed before 
accepting the proposed work item (e.g., from the IESG, IAB, or another 
standards development organization).

---

From: Alexey Melnikov <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:27:14 +0100

I wasn't quite clear on the fact that neither Peter not I have any 
intent to chair this proposed WG.