Subject: WG Review: Applications Area Working Group (APPSAWG)

From: IESG Secretary <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 10:30:02 -0700 (PDT)

A new IETF working group has been proposed in the Applications Area.  The
IESG has not made any determination as yet. The following draft charter
was submitted, and is provided for informational purposes only. Please
send your comments to the IESG mailing list ([email-masked]) by Tuesday,
October 5, 2010.  

Applications Area Working Group (APPSAWG)
------------------------------------------
Current Status: Proposed Working Group 
Last updated: 2010-09-24

Chair(s): TBD

Applications Area Directors:
 Alexey Melnikov <[email-masked]>
 Peter Saint-Andre <[email-masked]>

Applications Area Advisor:
 Alexey Melnikov <[email-masked]>

Mailing Lists: TBD

Description of Working Group:

The Applications Area Directors 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) can serve as a forum for
such work in the IETF.  The APPSAWG accepts work items in accordance 
with the  consensus of the Working 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, HTTP, internationalization, language tags, MIME, URIs 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).

(5) There is no existing related Working Group that is willing to
recharter to take on this work, and the document doesn't justify the 
formation of a new working group.

In order to evaluate success of this WG, it is deliberately limited in
its duration. The WG needs to close or be rechartered to remove this
restriction before July 2011.