Subject: RE: WG Chairs' training/information/resources?

From: Eastlake III Donald-LDE008 <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 14:30:14 -0500

The number of IETF wgchairs now is approximately what total IETF meeting attendance was in 1990.

As human institutions change size, they must change structure or they fail. No one thinks much about security when having a party for 20 people. With 200 people you might worry a bit more and consider hiring a guard or two, maybe to help direct parking. With an event for 20,000 you had better have a security and crowd control organization with an appropriate communications center, radios, logistics planning for food, toilets, medical care, etc., and a few doodads like a written plan for how to handle bomb threats would be a good idea.

Considering structural change:

What would happen if each Area had a paid full time "assistant" with regular office hours to track things and that you could call on the phone and talk to as well as email? Assuming low wage interns, then even with overhead and some benefits, you could probably pay for that with a $50 or less increase in meeting registration.

With co-ADs in all areas, you could divide the IESG into two sub-teams with an AD from every area. What if Informational drafts from the RFC Editor were normally reviewed by only one sub-team and those from WGs were reviewed by the sub-team not including the AD for the WG, so the overall IESG con-calls could, for drafts, mostly concentrate on standards track?

Etc.

Donald

-----Original Message-----
From: Theodore Ts'o [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Thursday, December 05, 2002 12:16 PM
To: Spencer Dawkins
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: WG Chairs' training/information/resources?

On Tue, Dec 03, 2002 at 10:10:37AM -0600, Spencer Dawkins wrote:
> I suspect that one reason for the level of interest in wgchairs
> mailing list is that we are having discussions we would love to have
> on the main discussion list (and it would be more transparent if we
> did), but we can't stand the signal-to-noise ratio there.
> 
> Is there a realistic way for the IETF to communicate via e-mail (as
> opposed to IETF wgchairs communicating via e-mail, or IETF
> workgroups communicating via e-mail), or have we just blown all
> scaling away for this possibility? Maybe the recent open-mike
> plenaries are the best, and most effective, way to do this anyway,
> but...

I think you're so very right.  Ultimately, I suspect it's an issue of
scaling.  Just as there's been concern that the IESG can't grow beyond
a certain size without losing some of its effectiveness (this has come
up in the recent discussions about the disposition of Sub-IP area),
mailing lists beyond a certain size just don't work any more, and I
fear the IETF mailing list has met that fate.

The only real solution has been to fall back to a more restricted
list, which we seem to have done naturally, without any real explicit
decision.  That's unfortunate, but there may not be any other remedy,
although in the interests of transparency hopefully the wgchairs
mailing list is at least archived publically.

One thought might be to create a list which consists of the wgchairs
plus all authors of ID's that are associated with a working group and
which have been published in the last 9 months.  That would result in
a list that as a community which is larger than just the wgchairs, but
smaller than global IETF list.

I'm not sure I like the idea of an "elite list", but I don't know of
any other way of filtering out the Jim Flemings and Dan Bernsteins of
the world; and it's not just them, it's also their disciples, which
they invite to join the list for lobbying purposes.  The end result is
a denial of service attack on the list.

> Obligatory sociology - I also know, by face, almost everyone who
> posts here. That was never the case for me on the main IETF discussion
> list, and I can visualize several of you thinking, "and that is a
> FEATURE, not a bug!"

I definitely consider this a feature....

						- Ted

---

From: Aaron Falk <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 17:50:52 -0800

Eastlake III Donald-LDE008 wrote:
> What would happen if each Area had a paid full time "assistant" with
> regular office hours to track things and that you could call on the
> phone and talk to as well as email? Assuming low wage interns, then
> even with overhead and some benefits, you could probably pay for
> that with a $50 or less increase in meeting registration.

Great idea.  I've advocated it myself.  Where should the money come
from to pay them?  

--aaron

---

From: Bill Sommerfeld <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 Dec 2002 22:01:02 -0500

Here's an alternate idea:

Go for horizontal scalability: deal with throughput/workload issues by
pushing most documents through only one of a set of N
mostly-independant functional units.

Appoint N AD's (maybe you rename the role to area expert?) for each
area.  

Form N sub-IESG's, each with one AD from each area, so you get
breadth.  Grow N over time based on workload; workload should be tuned
to require no more than one day a week on average.

Secretariat acts as load-balancer, assigning document sets to the
sub-IESG with the shortest queue.  Maybe you have some amount of
WG-to-subIESG affinity, maybe you don't.

Most work is done in sub-IESG con-calls, with less frequent full-IESG
meetings.

Two stage review: sub-IESG does first pass using something resembling
current IESG review process; once it passes there, document then goes
to whole IESG for a limited-time "speak now or forever hold your
peace" pass.  Raising an objection at this stage would be relatively
rare and require a significant defect.

If an objection is raised, discuss it in a forum containing the IESG
plus key interested parties (WG chair, document editor, key WG
members, ...).  Then if the issue is not resolved by this discussion,
the IESG votes in a more conventional way (majority or supermajority
required to publish).  If it passes despite "no" votes, the dissenters
get to insert a dissenting opinion into the document, but it gets
published anyway.

Maybe you apply a higher standard of approval than the above for
documents going to draft/full standard.

						- Bill

---

From: Margaret Wasserman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 08:39:04 -0500

Hi All,

I just made a suggestion on the problem-statement list that I
thought I would re-state here, as perhaps not all WG chairs are
on that list.

I think that we all agree that there are some management problems
within the IETF, at both the IESG and WG chairs levels.  Some of
these problems are probably caused by the general lack of management
experience and training in our leaders...

However, many of us belong to companies that have excellent
management training and development programs.  Perhaps we should
ask our companies to allow us to participate in those programs
to improve our management skills, even though we are not actually
"managers" within our companies?

Many of us also work for successful managers.  Perhaps it would
make sense to use our managers as resources to help us with
management problems within our groups?

Margaret

---

From: Derek Atkins <[email-masked]>
Date: 10 Dec 2002 09:59:03 -0500

That puts those of us without such a corporate sponser at a
disadvantage.  Not everyone works for a CiscoNortelSunMicroSoftATTNTTEtAl.

-derek

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