Subject: On priorities

From: Ted Hardie <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 May 2005 14:54:06 -0700

Several folks in the recent discussion have questioned whether
the IESG and IAB had their priorities straight when trying to
get the IAOC/IAD set up, strongly implying that it shouldn't
have been put ahead of other work on standards process improvement.
That's wrong on two fronts.  The IESG and IAB have supported
work from the EDU team, the PROTO team, and NEWTRK, so
that several efforts at process improvement have gone forward
in the past two years.  Those have been simultaneous with
the admin restructuring; they were not asked to wait until
the other work ran to completion.

Those efforts might have gotten more energy from the IESG or IAB
had there not been a simultaneous need to pay attention to administrative
restructuring.  That admin restructuring is not at the scale of small issues
with the secretariat, though; it's at the large scale of making sure 
that the IETF
keeps going. Going back and re-reading RFC 3716, especially the 
issues related to
resource management (section 3.1 and on) may really help to
refocus folks on the scale of the problem we've been facing.  Putting
that off would not have been a wise course.

Now that we're putting in place a process that takes that load
from the IESG and hands it to a person and structure designed
to handle it, I'm hoping time spent on the administration by
the IESG will go down to near nil.  But the real success there is
the example of functional differentiation.  A function that had
somehow ended up on the IESG's lap is being moved to other
hands, ones which should be better able to take care of it.  That's
a good example of where we need to go, and I encourage folks
to think in those terms--what bits of the process are currently
hitting bottlenecks because the same set of folks perform them?
The PROTO work has identified some, but there are no doubt
others.  The ones I've suggested in the past (BoF approval,
approval of non-Standards track documents, etc.) haven't gotten
much traction.  Fair enough, I may be aiming for the wrong
targets.  But I still think that thinking in terms of functional
differentiation can help us identify the right targets.
             		regards,
                 		Ted Hardie

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