Subject: Improving IETF review - further work

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2003 11:18:18 -0500

At the Wednesday plenary in Minneapolis a discussion on improving
   cross-functional document review was started (please see [Ref1]). We
   talked about several proposals initiated within the wider community
   [Ref2, Ref3], and outlined a few proposals that came from the IESG
   members [Ref4, Ref5, Ref6]. As a result of the discussion we received
   a fair level of the support from the community. We believe that there
   is a rough consensus within the community that pursuing this
   direction is a good idea.

   To ensure continuous progress on this matter, we would like to better
   organize the discussion and create a forum where the details of the
   final set of improved cross-functional review mechanisms would be
   worked out and documented. The IESG is considering creation of a WG
   within the General Area dedicated to this topic. Information on the
   mailing list and main goals of the WG is given below. The first item
   for discussion on the mailing list will be the WG charter.

   WG name: icar (improved cross-area review)

   Mailing list: [email-masked]
   Subscription: [email-masked]
   Archives : 
   https://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/working-groups/icar/current/maillist.html

   WG objective:

     Work out mechanisms for improved cross-functional review within the
     IETF. This includes a better peer-to-peer community review, as well
     as more structured (formal) pre-IESG review that may be used to
     improve scalability of the IESG review function. It is an explicit
     goal of the WG to come up with mechanisms encouraging earlier review
     of the documents. An early review is best for catching architectural
     problems while they're still relatively easy to solve. In
     particular, many cross-area interactions can be spotted and dealt
     with, thus avoiding many "late surprises". A final review can catch
     remaining cross-area interactions, as well as deal with overall
     quality issues.

     The WG will cooperate with others in starting and evaluating
     experiments with both early reviews and structured reviews. The
     evaluation of such experiments may be published as Informational
     RFCs if the group so desires.

   WG milestones:

     FEB 2004: Submit -00 draft on improved peer-to-peer community review
     FEB 2004: Submit -00 draft on improved structured review
     SEP 2004: Submit draft on improved peer-to-peer community review to
                         the IESG for publication as BCP
     SEP 2004: Submit draft on improved structured community review to
                         the IESG for publication as BCP
     SEP 2005: Evaluate WG progress and potential; close or recharter

   Comments on the proposed WG objective and milestones are welcome.

 --
   References:

   [Ref1] Slides on cross-functional review from the plenary
                 http://www.alvestrand.no/ietf/nov2003-minneapolis/

   [Ref2] draft-carpenter-solution-sirs-01.txt

   [Ref3] draft-allman-problem-wg-revcomm-00.txt

   [Ref4] draft-iesg-hardie-outline-01.txt

   [Ref5] draft-iesg-alvestrand-twolevel-00.txt

   [Ref6] draft-zinin-early-review-00.txt