Subject: RE: New idea for early cross-area review

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 12:44:51 -0500

Cross-area review of an ID should be a requirement for all WG IDs before
they are sent to the IESG for review and IETF LC. 
Creating a new mailing list to send an announcement solicting review has
very little chance of succeeding (given the current mindset). It is 
better to put the onus on the WG chairs that a cross-area review be a
part of the process that needs to occur (but NOT for all WG IDs, just
the ones that are deemed so by the WG chairs and the AD) before the ID
is submitted to the IESG. Let the WG chairs do the hard work of identifying
the reviewers and chasing them to get it done in a timely manner.
This does have the downside of adding yet another step to the process, but
given the value of the cross-area-review and hopefully the reduced time
spent in the IESG on Discusses, it is worth it.

-Basavaraj

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From: "David B Harrington" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 14:15:37 -0400

Hi,

I have a concern that the extra required reviews and id-nits checking
is making it tremendously difficult to get a standard completed in the
IETF. 

I think the need for cross-area review is not clearly defined, and
that could in itself be a problem. The mail I chose to respond to is
symptomatic of the problem: "Cross-area review of an ID should be a
requirement for all WG IDs" and "but NOT for all WG IDs"; which is it?
It cannot be both.

I personally oppose making cross-area review a requirement. The
response I expect to this statement is "don't you want good
standards?", to which I will reply:
Yes I want good standards, but we emphasize differently - you may want
"GOOD standards", I want "good STANDARDS"; A standard is not a good
standard if it comes three years too late to be useful, no matter how
well written and how well reviewed.

David Harrington
[email-masked]

> -----Original Message-----
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> [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of 
> [email-masked]
> Sent: Tuesday, May 10, 2005 1:45 PM
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> Subject: RE: New idea for early cross-area review
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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 11:18:07 +0200

> they are sent to the IESG for review and IETF LC. 

Specifically, we think that is desirable, but too late for
the first cross-area review. If a proposal has fundamental
cross-area problems at the Last Call stage, it's very bad news
since much effort has already gone into the work. The need
is very specifically to detect cross area problems much earlier,
before ideas are frozen. They will be much cheaper to fix at
that stage.

> the reviewers and chasing them to get it done in a timely manner.

In an ideal world, I'd agree. But we have two choices here - make a formal
process change requiring this, or trying something cheap and informal.
I'm quite happy to add to the proposal a specific request to WG Chairs to
solicit reviews in parallel with WG adoption of a draft, but we need a
low-cost way of supporting this automatically.

> spent in the IESG on Discusses, it is worth it.

But it's even more worth it if we can avoid an extra formal step and still
get the early reviews.

    Brian