Subject: Tighter admission policy for I-Ds (was: blank!)

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1999 00:36:05 -0500

I'm not the IETF list interpreter (by any stretch of the imagination), but I
understood Vern's quote as a two-parter:

- Why would an AD willing to sponsor a BOF not also be willing to sponsor
the I-D that leads TO the BOF?

- Why would an AD willing to sponsor a BOF not also be willing to sponsor
the I-D that comes OUT OF the BOF?

Randy answered the second question, which was one of the choices, and
answered it in a reasonable way, but the first question seems to be more
relevant to this discussion (and WHY are we having this discussion with a
blank "Subject:" on this thread? but that's another story, I guess).

As long as I'm typing, John Stracke expressed the view that having ADs be
the admission point for the thousand-or-so individual I-Ds doesn't scale
well, and that may be true. What if the criteria was 

(1) an existing working group is willing to sponsor it (although not as a
workgroup deliverable), or

(2) an AD was willing to sponsor a BOF on the I-D, or

(3) an AD was willing to sponsor the I-D?

With the usual appeals (IESG, IAB, NONCOM) for those I-Ds that are so
brilliantly visionary that NONE of the 150-250 people in these categories
can appreciate them?

And, backing up slightly - Charlie Perkins pointed out that MobileIP is
still benefitting from I-Ds done years ago, that never made it to RFC
status. (yeah, this was in another thread, but that's what happens when
people leave the subject blank!). Let me ask the question again - what about
requests to publish an I-D directly as Historical? Charlie's "Hierarchical
Foreign Agents" I-D seems like the CLASSIC I-D with interesting ideas that
was abandoned for a while - if the WG chairs for MobileIP said "we think
this version of this I-D is worth keeping around, but we don't want anyone
to think it was FINISHED", would this be wrong (modulo marketing misuse of
"RFC anything")?

I keep going back to this - automatic archiving of I-Ds forces us to either

(1) keep every version of the I-D, so that the person looking for nuggets
gets to look under several rocks, or

(2) keep the most recent version of the I-D, even though this wasn't the
most interesting (I still think the Wide-Area SLP I-D was amazing in version
00, but the SLP group said "cut it down to something we can discuss in less
than a full IETF slot" - so version 01 was about 1/3 as long).

If someone says "THIS version of THIS I-D is worth keeping", that puts a lot
fewer trees in the forest...

Spencer

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Randy Bush [SMTP:[email-masked]]
> Sent:	Friday, August 20, 1999 9:00 PM
> To:	Vernon Schryver
> Cc:	[email-masked]
> Subject:	Re: RE:
> 
> > Why would an AD willing to sponsor a BOF not also be willing to sponsor
> > the I-D that leads to or comes out of the BOF?
> 
> because they did not support the outcome, did not feel it had consensus,
> ...
> 
> if the outcome of a bof was known beforehand, there would be no need to
> have
> it.
> 
> randy
> 
> -
> This message was passed through [email-masked], which
> is a sublist of [email-masked]. Not all messages are passed.
> Decisions on what to pass are made solely by Harald Alvestrand.

---

From: Scott Bradner <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1999 08:52:30 -0400 (EDT)

some people in this discussion seem to think that most (or some) ADs
would have the time to review (however quickly) IDs to see if they
should be published - speaking for myself, don't bet on it

in addition I think it would be a real shame to change the direction
of the IETF that much - we have benefited  greatly from IDs that
have come out of left field (not all of them but some of them)
and it does not seem in the IETF's general interest (which is producing
the best technology) to block or inhibit a source of input to our process.

Scott

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1999 08:33:49 -0600 (MDT)

> From: Scott Bradner <[email-masked]>

> the best technology) to block or inhibit a source of input to our process.

Gresham's Law says essentially that if you don't block or inhibit some
sources of input, the bad input will make the good extinct.

If you look compare the percentage of bad output in the last 500 RFC's or
the last 1000 I-D's with the percentage of bad output in the first 500
RFC's, or any pair of reasonably separated samples, you will see that
Gresham's Law is operating on the IETF.

To put it another way, how soon do you figure that it will stop being
worthwhile for most people to even skim the announced I-D abstracts looking
for something to worth reading?   I can remember when most drafts were
interesting.  Now, a list of titles of I-D's is only a little better than
list of subject lines in a newsgroup.

Or to put it yet another way, how long before the stream of I-D's follow
the evolution of the mailinglist that became the comp.protocols.tcp-ip
newsgroup?  Do you know anyone who reads that newsgroup today?  I don't
think I do, but original the mailinglist was universally read among
people who cared about IP kinds of things.

Or yet another, what percentage of I-D's eventually appear as RFC's?
What percentage of Informational RFC's are ever implemented or even
read after publication?  (the last value might be approximated by
looking at statistics from FTP servers such as venera.isi.edu;
count fetches of individual RFC's.)

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

---

From: Scott Bradner <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1999 11:43:21 -0400 (EDT)

> sources of input, the bad input will make the good extinct.

seems to me that we are quite far from that endpoint

it is my belief is that the proposed solution is worse than the disease for
the IETF at this time

I suppose we could set up a commitee to filter the IDs (the ADs do not
have the time) but in any case it seems like a good way to block
new ideas if one of the reviewers disagees with the concepts in the ID

Scott

---

From: Scott Bradner <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1999 11:43:21 -0400 (EDT)

Scott

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1999 10:31:19 -0600 (MDT)

> seems to me that we are quite far from that endpoint

We disagree.

> new ideas if one of the reviewers disagees with the concepts in the ID

As has been stated several times, that is a red herring.  No one would
have any veto power over any ID.  Instead, you would have need all members
of the IAB, IESG, and all WG chairs to unanimously oppose an ID for it to
be stopped.

A reasonable objection to the idea is that it would not do significant
filtering.  You might figure that given the many candidates, a bad guy
intent on getting a bogus ID or Informational RFC published could always
find someone who would not pay enough attention (or worse) as a sponsor.

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1999 10:31:19 -0600 (MDT)

We disagree.