Subject: Re: Tighter admission policy for I-Ds

From: "Donald E. Eastlake 3rd" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 08:33:15 -0400

[My apologies.  I have no idea why my previous reply was truncated.
Due to a variety of circumstances, I lost the original of my reply but
I'm trying again...  dee3]

> To: [email-masked] 
> Subject: Re: Tighter admission policy for I-Ds 
> From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]> 
> Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1999 08:33:49 -0600 (MDT) 
> 
> > From: Scott Bradner <[email-masked]>
> 
> > 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.

I agree with Scott.

> 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.

Grsham's Law applied to money.  It says that, for example, if there
are two coins with the same nominal value, say $1, but different
intrinsic value, such as being made of silver and of base metal, that
people will prefer to spend the coins with a lower intrinsic value and
horde the ones with a greater intrinsic value.  This is true and base
metal "silver dollars" have driven actual silver dollars out of
circulation in the US but I don't think it applies to IDs nor have I
seen evidence that people are hording good idea because there are low
quality IDs being posted.

(Perhaps Sturgeon's law, which says that 90% of everything is crap, does
apply.)

> 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.

Unless you can show that good IDs have vanished, this has nothing to
do with Gresham's Law.

> 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.

I think this has much more to do with the growth of the IETF.  That's
a separate issue and perhaps the IETF should not be trying to do so
much in so many areas but as the volume and variety of work
increases, it is entirely reasonable that , on average, even the most
knowledgeable and enthusiastic participants review and contribute to a
smaller percentage of the work.

> ...
> 
> 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.)

Some statistics would be interesting.

> Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

The theory, as some have advocated, that it should take approval by an
IAB or IESG member or WG (co-)chair for a draft to be published seems
silly to me.  First of all, it leaves out the most obvious approver,
the RFC-Editor (see the many draft-rfced- drafts).  Second, with such
a huge body of potential approvers, it will have very little effect in
reducing technically "bad" drafts.  What is really does is increase the
cost of submitting a draft, not by imposing a monetary fee, but by
imposing a mostly empty bureaucratic step.  It will discourage some
good drafts whose authors don't want the hassle.  And it will have
little effect on authors of bad drafts that are willing to put in 
some work shopping around for approval.

Part of the IETF's success has come from being able to, on average,
move faster than other organizations.  Lets not pour glue in the
gears unless it is absolutely necessary.

Donald

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 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd   +1 914-276-2668     [email-masked]
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From: "Donald E. Eastlake 3rd" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 08:33:15 -0400

I agree with Scott.

Donald