Subject: Re: [I18ndir] I18ndir last call review of draft-iab-rfcefdp-rfced-model-11

From: Peter Saint-Andre <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2022 11:04:09 -0700

On 2/28/22 12:21 PM, Pete Resnick wrote:
> On 26 Feb 2022, at 11:42, John C Klensin wrote:
> 
>     Pete,
> 
>     As another acknowledged contributor, I would presumably also be
>     exempt even if it were not for your policy of excluding me from
>     Directorate reviews.
> 
> It was my memory (perhaps faulty) that you were not doing reviews by 
> mutual agreement in order to attend to other tasks. Let's chat offline 
> if my brain cells are mushier than expected.

FYI, I've decided to leave the tech industry (see [1] for details) but 
if you need me to do reviews I can continue doing so despite what will 
no doubt be increasingly rustier knowledge of i18n. :-)

Peter

[1] https://philosopher.coach/2022/02/17/a-new-focus/

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2022 21:20:58 -0500

(Distribution considerably reduced: the question of whether
there should be some RFC-related i18n review mechanism is
relevant to RFCED-Future, questions about the state of the
directorate probably are not.)

--On Monday, February 28, 2022 13:21 -0600 Pete Resnick
<resnick=[email-masked]> wrote:

>> As another acknowledged contributor, I would presumably also
>> be exempt even if it were not for your policy of excluding me
>> from Directorate reviews.
> 
> It was my memory (perhaps faulty) that you were not doing
> reviews by mutual agreement in order to attend to other tasks.
> Let's chat offline if my brain cells are mushier than expected.

Ancient history and not much to chat about, but I believe you
announced that decision to me rather than there being a
discussion before it was made.  If everything worked smoothly
and, in particular, expertise were evenly distributed across the
directorate membership, I would have welcomed that decision
because I've been overloaded with other things and, as you put
it, have needed to attend to other tasks.  I almost certainly
said that at the time so one way of putting things together gets
mutual agreement and your memory is close enough.  

The problem, or at least one of them, is that expertise has,
predictably, not been evenly spread around.  If nothing else,
the many issues and complications that fall under the i18n
umbrella are such that the directorate members, collectively,
are _far_ more expert than any of us individually.  That is,
IMO, much less the case with similar numbers of experienced
people drawn for most other areas of the IETF (ART is "special"
in some ways and got more special with the Apps-Real Time
merger).   I was concerned about that when we started and think
I mentioned that at the time, but my memory could be faulty too.
I don't think it would be useful for me to dig out my mail
archives and notes, so let's let that go.

However, Martin's review is an example of what we've found
although the examples get better with documents with more
i18n-specific content: he found an issue and made some comments
that I might not have made; I added to them.  If I had done the
review and he had looked, I'm confident he would found some
issues that I missed -- our experience, knowledge, and
perspectives are just different.  And it has turned out that I
have felt a need to check other reviews and then, again because
perspectives and experience differ rather than because the draft
review is somehow wrong, to do enough writing that the idea of
keeping my out the review list has saved just about nothing.

For that reason (and this is probably a new suggestion rather
than something we discussed in the past), if we are going to do
fully-competent reviews, we should probably be assigning a
reviewer and a review-reviewer to each one... and not choose the
reviewers at random but do some matching so as to get
complementary knowledge and experience.

>...
>> This
>> so-called Directorate may include the appropriate people, but,
>> as I understand the rules, it is currently constrained to
>> offering advice to the ART ADs and not to the wider community
>> the RFC Editor Function.
> 
> That is not my reading of our charter:
> 
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/i18ndir/about/
> 
> - Advises Area Directors and other IETF stakeholders
> (including other directorates and review teams, such as the
> Security Directorate and ART Area Review Team) with regard to
> internationalization.
> 
> While the top line of our charter is certainly to "assist[]
> the Area Directors of the Applications and Real-Time Area with
> regard to internationalization", I do not see anything that
> prevents us from doing informal reviews for others. Of course,
> if we were to be doing formal review that would probably
> require a more formal role to be identified in the charter
> (and perhaps elsewhere in IETF procedures).

Let me tell you what I remember (because parts of it were fairly
painful, my memory feels rather clear, but that is no
guarantee).  From the time of the BOF and maybe even in the
notes prior to it, the assumption was "advise the IETF" a
concept that included noticing issues and patterns of them and
speaking up about them, not just reviewing documents (formally
or informally).  That turned out to be controversial for reasons
that I, still thinking that the IETF should focus more on
getting the right things done than getting tied up in procedures
(or even charters), did not understand.  But that was when I
recall being very clearly told that our scope was to advise the
ART ADs (consistent with that top line).  I have never
interpreted it as forbidding us from doing Last Call reviews or
informal reviews if we were asked (although, if someone wanted
to stand on ceremony, I suppose they or we would need to ask the
ADs for permission).  And I think that deciding we would not do
the review Mirja asked for would be, at best, silly.  On the
other hand, had neither she nor anyone else (particularly the
ART ADs) asked and we had just gotten together and decided to
submit a review in the name of the directorate, that might be
(or have been) considered inappropriate in some quarters.

Is that at least a tad more clear?

    best,
      john