Subject: Milestones requirements, -03

From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2011 16:14:35 -0700

Greetings again. Following the lively meeting in Québec last week, I have updated the draft for the milestones tool. The diffs are here: <http://tools.ietf.org/rfcdiff?url2=draft-ietf-genarea-milestones-tool-03>. The biggest change is in section 4. Please read the whole section carefully so that we can be sure that we are in general agreement here.

Near the end of that section, there is a topic for this list:

   When any of these six actions is reflected in the Datatracker, an
   email notification is sent to the WG mailing list by the Datatracker.
   [[ NOTE: at the Quebec meeting, there was a discussion about this
   requirement.  There was a concern that the mailing lists would get
   cluttered if a chair was making a bunch of changes at once.  Some WG
   chairs wanted to be able to suppress the message so that they could
   send a message themselves saying what was updated.  Other WG chairs
   wanted the messages to be batched, such as once a day.  Comments
   about this are solicited. ]]

--Paul Hoffman

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From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2011 19:54:59 -0400

> The biggest change is in section 4. Please read the whole section carefully so
> that we can be sure that we are in general agreement here.

Looks good, in general; it's as we discussed in Québec.

>   about this are solicited. ]]

As the one who brought this up, I think I should say something.  I
definitely agree with Tobias that kicking off these messages for each
change, without batching them, would be annoying, and I wouldn't want
it.  If batching is not an option, then I'd say we should either
eliminate the WG-list notification or make it optional.

For me, batching would be adequate and I wouldn't see a reason to make
it optional.  I have a *slight* preference (only very slight), from
the point of view of transparency, not to allow chairs to skip the
notifications altogether.  On the other hand, I sympathize with the
desire to tailor the message, so I'd support the ability to add a note
from the chair(s) to the notification.  Added to batching, this would
be great.  Something like this (where the "--- xxx ---" annotations
wouldn't be part of the message):

--- automatic section ---
The following milestones for the FROBOZZ working group have been changed:
* Send the XYZZY document to the IESG.  (April, 2018)
* Adopt a document to address the PLOVER requirement.  (July, 2018)
* Send the PLUGH document to the IESG.  (Septoober, 2018)

--- section added by chair ---
Based on the discussion at the Novosibirsk meeting, I've adjusted some
of the milestones.  Note that the XYZZY document must be done before
we can agree on a PLOVER document, so we've allocated time for
discussion in between.

--- end ---

A comment on section 5:

	   When an Internet-Draft is added to a WG, the Datatracker will send a	
 	   message to the WG chairs reminding them that they might want to add	
 	   it to a milestone or create a new milestone for it.  Once a month,	
 	   the Datatracker will send mail to the WG chairs if there are WG	
 	   Internet-Drafts that are not in any WG milestones.

I wouldn't be especially happy with this, but that may be an artifact
of chairing the appsawg working group, which has a different mode of
working (note that its charter has no milestones).  We could work
around this by adding a milestone for each document that we accept, or
by adding one milestone with a date waaaaay in the future, against
which we attach all documents.  But mostly, we pick up documents,
rescuing them from "individual submission hell", handle them, and move
them on.  I wouldn't want constant reminders that we have a handful of
documents in the hopper -- it wouldn't help anything, and will just
annoy me into working around it somehow.

But perhaps most WG chairs would find this useful, in which case you
should kindly ignore this comment.

Barry

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From: Al Morton <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Aug 2011 08:50:43 -0400

At 07:54 PM 8/1/2011, Barry Leiba wrote:
>          ...Once a month,
>working (note that its charter has no milestones).

Me neither, I would be looking for a way to disable this feature
after two months or less...

Al

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From: Robert Sparks <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2011 16:05:09 -0500

Snipping a part of Barry's message:

> should kindly ignore this comment.

The quoted text from section 5 might be getting to far into mechanism.

The desire is to make it more likely that a chair takes the time to associate
a document with a milestone when it makes sense to do so. 

Instead of sending a message when a document is added to a tracker reminding them that they might
need to make this association, I would rather the tracker ask them _as they are adding the document _. 

Instead of mail listing unbound documents, the summary page for the working group should just make
it easy to tell which documents aren't associated with a milestone (without it being presented as "bad"
or as an error condition - as Barry notes, for some groups, having many documents in this state might
be normal).

RjS

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From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2011 06:50:21 -0700

[[ While there is a probably-temporary lull in the IPR thread, I want to remind folks that there is another thread happening on this list... ]]

--Paul Hoffman