Subject: Re: engineering discipline WAS: stats from the text conferencing experiment

From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Dec 2002 18:21:32 -0500

In message <[email-masked]>, Melinda Shore writes:
> It's very
>easy for a working group to come to consensus on something
>that's perfectly awful.  Right now, as working group chairs
>we're not really given the latitude to shut that stuff down
>by fiat.

I think that this is a very important point.  Right now, the IESG does 
have the power to block bad ideas, but only very late in the game.  RFC 
2418 does not explicitly give such power to WG chairs, but does have 
some language about "wide discretion" and "the Chair's responsibility
encompasses *at* least the following" [emphasis added].  But most of 
the examples pertain to process, not quality.  By contrast, Section 6.7
explicitly gives the AD control over content.

So -- should chairs have the discretion to declare that something is a 
bad idea?  What are the checks and balances on this power?  Just an 
appeal to the AD?

		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb (me)
		http://www.wilyhacker.com ("Firewalls" book)

---

From: Erik Guttman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2002 00:32:47 +0100

> bad idea?  What are the checks and balances on this power?  Just an 

WG chairs who are also document author/editors obviously should not
have the power to silence debate.  (One could argue WG chairs should not
be document author/editors in the first place.  Like it or not, this
configuration sees a large fraction of the work in the IETF through.)

Erik

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Dec 2002 18:48:57 -0500

> have the power to silence debate.

This relates to the admonition to keep an open mind, but not
so open that your brains fall out.  I have a lot of
experience in flat-structured organizations that make
decisions by using consensus (the real kind) process, and
the value of the process is that it produces better results.
In this case we're talking about situations in which the
process produces worse results.  For example, it's
increasingly common for working groups to fundamentally
agree that IP routing information should be pushed up to the
application so that the application can make appropriate
choices.  Do we *really* need to let that get all the way to
the IESG before it gets slapped down?  Is the process so
intrinsically valuable that it needs to be privileged over
the quality of the results?  If working groups agreeing to
bad ideas were rare I might agree that it is, but I'm just
not that sure anymore.

Melinda

---

From: Derek Atkins <[email-masked]>
Date: 03 Dec 2002 00:56:09 -0500

I'm more worried about times when ADs and WG Chairs do NOT 
nip bad ideas in the bud, but instead let them fester for
a long time.  Sometimes they get better, more often they do
not.

This is probably closer related to the "we don't say 'no' often enough"
problem...

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins
       Computer and Internet Security Consultant
       [email-masked]             www.ihtfp.com

---

From: Bernard Aboba <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 21:23:54 -0800 (PST)

> bad idea?  What are the checks and balances on this power?  Just an

I do not think we want chairs either to be able to pronounce drafts as
"bad ideas" without review, or to encourage them to request IESG
intervention to do the same.

What *does* seem reasonable to me is for a WG chair or AD to call
an external expert to provide impartial review or assistance in an area in
which the WG lacks expertise. An important part of the WG chair
responsibility is to understand what the expertise of the WG members is,
and what problems the WG cannot solve on its own.

In my personal experience WGs are often quite competent in their
core area of expertise, but may lack sufficient breadth in areas outside
of this. After all, it takes a lot of effort to become an expert in one
subject nowadays -- how many of us are expert in many?

Thus, it seems to me that an important aspect of a WG work item review or
WG charter review is to identify the expertise necessary to complete the
work and demonstrate that it is available.

WGs that demonstrate lack of core competence in their own field of
expertise *do* happen -- but thankfully are relatively rare. Those cases
need more serious remedies to be applied, including shutdown.