Subject: RE: engineering discipline WAS: stats from the text confere ncing experiment

From: Eastlake III Donald-LDE008 <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 10:24:42 -0500

Dean,

I think there is a problem that different people have had diffeent experiences. Sometimes just what you say happens. But where the is a really interested and diverse community, it can be nothing like that. For example, in the XMLDSIG WG there were many real fundamental group decisions made through extended debate running for weeks, and in a few cases a couple of months, and then incorporated into and polised in the WG documents through group participation.

Donald

-----Original Message-----
From: Dean Willis [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 8:06 PM
To: 'Andy Bierman'; 'Spencer Dawkins'
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: RE: engineering discipline WAS: stats from the text
conferencing experiment

Andy objected to:
> Frank proposed:
>     ...   The working group is there to provide 
>     feedback and alternative views that X must consider 
>     but need not adopt. for the most part, the decision is
>     solely X's. <handwave-mode>Some things that the WG
>     raises, X must adopt -- where those things are 'critical'
>     to the Internet architecture/etc</handwave-mode>
> 
> This means that for all but the most critical decisions, the 
> WG consensus is not a significant factor in the output of the 
> WG. This is more power than even the WG Chair has now. The WG 
> Editor should write words that express the consensus of the 
> WG, not decide (or worse override) the consensus of the WG.

Let's be realistic about how authorship works today. X publishes the doc
as an individual effort, goes through three or four revs as individual,
then gets the nod to make it a WG effort, revises it a little, and gets
a "stamp of approval" from the WG. If he doesn't get the nods, then the
doc either dies or wanders off into individual-land.

This is VERY different from the communal-drafting model of 3GPP, where
some poor sod gets "elected" editor, slaps some text together, and then
further progress is made by group review of individually-contributed
(and tracked) "change requests" or shared-screen "drafting sessions".
It's not fun. It's downright painful. I'd have to get PAID to do
something like that -- I certainly wouldn't VOLUNTEER. If we go that
route, I'm not just quitting, I'm doing something dramatic like changing
my name, pretending the Internet never happened, and raising goats in
the desert somewhere. Goat cheese, anybody?

--
Dean