Subject: RE: Introducing the ID tracker

From: "Pat R. Calhoun" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2002 15:46:25 -0800

Wow. What a great tool.

Thanks for making this available - it will certainly make my life
easier.

PatC
-----Original Message-----
From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2002 3:10 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Introducing the ID tracker

Hello,

The IESG is always trying to work better.
We have gotten a number of comments from the community that it is
sometimes 
very hard to find out what the IESG is doing to documents, why documents

take a long time to process, who makes comments, what the comments are
and 
so on, and that this is a significant source of frustration for the 
community.

For the last year or so, the secretariat has been working on a tool to
help 
us keep track of what documents are on our plate, what state they are in

and who is responsible for them; we call it the "ID tracker". It's been
in 
use for about 6 months now, and has definitely improved our ability to
keep 
track.

For several months, the "status of items" pages on the IESG web pages
have 
been generated from this tool, showing the high-order bit of who we
think 
is responsible.

In order to help you know more about what we are doing, we've decided to

open up a public view of the ID tracker itself.

This will allow you to search for the documents you want to look at, and

for each document see:

- What its current state is
- What the history of IESG processing is
- AD and IESG comments on the document
- For documents in IESG consideration for standards track, what the 
individual ADs have indicated as their opinion on the document, and if
they 
think there are problems with it, what the comments are.

The last point is a revision of previous IESG policy, based on the
feedback 
from the Yokohama plenary; we are now telling you the names that go with

each comment from the IESG members.

The system is far from perfect - you can tell from the history of
documents 
that we've been changing this as we go along - but we hope that it will
be 
a useful tool for people to figure out what the IESG is doing with their

documents, and for them to have an easier time talking to the relevant
ADs 
in order to get what we all want out of the process - relevant, high 
quality standards for the Internet.

The tool and its documentation is found at

https://datatracker.ietf.org/public/pidtracker.cgi

The link to it will be placed on the IESG web page before the public 
announcement is sent (which will happen on Monday if we don't find
really 
serious problems with it).

Welcome!

              The IESG