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

From: Eastlake III Donald-LDE008 <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 1 Dec 2002 17:33:01 -0500

IEEE may have grown with less "deteration of quality and timeliness" but, while the factors you mention have some effect, I think the main thing is that it is infinitely more formal and compartmentalized than the IETF with a much higher cost of participation. If you required WG participants to attend almost all IETF meetings, so that, to a first approximation, only those with organziational sponsorship could participate, and provided, at best, some sort of Area memership review and eliminated IETF wide review, etc., I wouldn't be suprised if you would find standards being produced more quickly and with a more professional polish to the final documents. Would they be more useful? Probably the answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no. I'm sure the OSI standards documents were very thorough and well edited. But in that particular case, the more chaotic output of the IETF proved more useful. There may be an equally strong case where things turned out the other way.

Donald

-----Original Message-----
From: Bernard Aboba [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Sunday, December 01, 2002 10:56 AM
To: Margaret Wasserman
Cc: Randy Bush; [email-masked]
Subject: Re: engineering discipline WAS: stats from the text
conferencing experiment

> Agreed.  Are there examples of groups that have successfully
> made this transition?  Or do we need to chart new territory?

I believe that there are standards bodies, such as IEEE, that have handled
growth with less deterioration in quality and timeliness. However, they
also have considerably better tools for keeping track of comments,
an intellectual property policy that does a better job of inducing
disclosure, and a process that forces participants to read the documents
(or abstain) or lose their voting rights. And they also tend to be more
conservative about scope expansion.

Note - the IEEE has an executive committee but it only takes on a
fraction of the duties of the IESG.

---

From: Bernard Aboba <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 1 Dec 2002 19:11:20 -0800 (PST)

On Sun, 1 Dec 2002, Eastlake III Donald-LDE008 wrote:

> IEEE may have grown with less "deteration of quality and timeliness" but,
> while the factors you mention have some effect, I think the main thing
> is that it is infinitely more formal and compartmentalized than the IETF
> with a much higher cost of participation.

The cost of IETF participation has been getting higher and higher, both in
terms of meeting attendance fees, and the length of time and effort
required to get standards documents out. Making this cost any higher would
just be likely to drive more people away without improving the quality of
standards.

With respect to IEEE 802, the attendance requirement does appear to vary
between groups. Meeting attendance *is* a practical requirement in 802.11,
but that group appears to have no demonstrable superiority to IETF in
terms of document timeliness or quality.

On the other hand, IEEE 802.1 is pretty loose about attendance and their
documents seem to be both timely and high quality, so the correlation, if
it exists, seems to be an inverse one.

With respect to IEEE 802.1, I've written a significant fraction of a
standard without attending meetings, or ever becoming a
voting member of that group. Since the standard was completed in
24 months, my cost of participation was lower than most IETF
standardization efforts I've been involved in -- some of which
have dragged on for the better part of a decade.

> If you required WG participants to attend almost all IETF meetings

The IETF has operated without attendance requirements for years, and
formerly was able to get documents through the process more rapidly than
it does today. So I doubt that better IETF meeting attendance would
improve the process.

> participate, and provided, at best, some sort of Area membership review
> and eliminated IETF wide review, etc.,

IEEE *does* have wide review -- it just doesn't find a large number of
critical last minute issues in that process.

> Would they be more useful?

Comparing the recent work produced in IEEE 802.1 with a random sample of
IETF RFCs, it's not obvious that the IETF work is more timely,
higher quality, more professionally produced *or* more useful.

It's also hard to make a case that IETF WGs, which can sometimes
take as long as 5 years merely to get started, are as a result more
focussed and less confused than their IEEE 802 counterparts that only
take 6 months to accomplish the same thing.

Overall, I'd observe that there are some processes which improve with time
-- wine making, for example. There are other processes that are not
improved by adding lots of people or dramatically lengthening the
schedule. As the time to completion increases, there is a point beyond
which a standard's chance of success in the marketplace declines
significantly. I fear that a significant fraction of our output now
falls into that category.

> But in that particular case, the more chaotic output of the IETF
> proved more useful.

Perhaps you mean that the "process" is more chaotic -- the output
was not. And the "chaotic process" of yesteryear would appear
incredibly well organized and efficient from today's perspective.