Subject: Re: text suggested by ADs

From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 1 May 2005 07:47:50 +1000

A couple of thoughts...

I'll buy #1.

On #2, when an AD posts a DISCUSS, s/he is now required to post a 
comment to the id tracker. I don't think you want the AD to have to 
write it twice. Coming back to a comment that was made earlier (and has 
been made on [email-masked], which IMHO is a better place to 
have this part of the discussion) what you want is an automated note 
sent to the WG mailing list (or in the case of an individual 
submission, to the authors) indicating that the draft's tracker entry 
has been updated and giving a URL to go read it.

On your third comment, which you didn't number, there has been a 
mechanism for resolving a pocket veto since about 1997 or 1998, when 
two different ADs in fact were carrying out pocket vetoes. One of them 
was doing so by not forwarding documents from his area to the IESG for 
review, and the nomcom eventually removed him. The other was placing a 
DISCUSS during the IESG review on then being non-responsive in the 
ensuing dialog. To deal with the latter case, the IESG adopted a 
procedure in which a restricted set of answers were acceptable: "YES" 
or "NO", no "DISCUSS", "ABSTAIN", or "NO OBJECTION". If two ADs voted 
"NO", the document was returned to the working group, and otherwise the 
"DISCUSS" was overridden. In my tenure, the procedure was never 
exercised, but it was threatened on occasion, and in the particular 
case (IIRC) the document was returned to the working group - it did in 
fact have some serious issues.

I have been looking at the following paragraph for a little while and 
rewording around one of our odd distinctions. Sometimes documents come 
to the IESG from a working group, and sometimes they come as individual 
submissions placed by one or more authors. What I want is the largest 
relevant inclusion - if a document comes from a working group, the 
comments should go to the working group, and if it comes as an 
individual submission it should go to all of the authors. I note this 
is not the current practice - I have had a number of discussions with 
ADs on documents submitted as personal submissions where I alone among 
the authors was addressed by an AD, and a number of discussions on WG 
documents where I alone or the set of authors was mentioned, but not 
the working group. But let me define a term: to me, for the purposes of 
discussion, a "working group" is the mailing list it uses or the 
assembled participants at an IETF meeting or interim working group 
meeting, and when a document is submitted personally by a set of 
authors, the "working group" is that entire set of authors. With that 
definition...

I think we need to give the ADs a little credit here. Your use of the 
terms "intractable" and "veto" make them sound pretty awful. In fact, 
when an AD feels that strongly about something, there is usually at 
least some merit to the position. What I would really prefer to see 
happen when things come to a head like that - which isn't all that 
often - is for the document to be returned to the WG, the AD to talk 
with the WG (in email or in person) about the issues, and work with the 
WG to come to closure on the issues.

On Apr 30, 2005, at 8:53 AM, Dave Crocker wrote:
>>  I'd rather force DISCUSS to be very explicit about the reason, and 
>> be limited to the areas mentioned, but specifically prohibit 
>> last-pass edits of the sort that ought to happen during last call or 
>> within the WG.
>
> Let me suggest that the rules be quite simple:
>
> 1. A Discuss may be asserted only when it pertains to a normative 
> concern that involves the viability of the specification.
>
> 2. The AD raising the Discuss must post the details of their concern 
> to the mailing list targeted to that specification and must provide 
> clear direction as to how to cure the problem.  Failing the ability to 
> provide the detail about how to fix the specification, the AD must 
> engage in a dialogue that has the goal of specifying that detail.
>
> In order to deal with the issue of a pocket veto, whereby the AD is 
> intractable but maintains the veto, there needs to be a mechanism to 
> force review of the Discuss, either to assert that, indeed, it 
> involves a valid showstopper (failure) of the specification or that it 
> can be ignored.
>
>  d/
>  ---
>  Dave Crocker
>  Brandenburg InternetWorking
>  +1.408.246.8253
>  dcrocker  a t ...
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---

From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 01 May 2005 11:33:33 +0200

At 23:47 30/04/2005, Fred Baker wrote:
>On #2, when an AD posts a DISCUSS, s/he is now required to post a comment 
>to the id tracker. I don't think you want the AD to have to write it 
>twice. Coming back to a comment that was made earlier (and has been made 
>on [email-masked], which IMHO is a better place to have this part 
>of the discussion) what you want is an automated note sent to the WG 
>mailing list (or in the case of an individual submission, to the authors) 
>indicating that the draft's tracker entry has been updated and giving a 
>URL to go read it.

As a general rule and to make everyone aware of the id tracker, I would 
suggest it to be netiquette to refer to Drafts though their ULD there - as 
for any other quoted document. It would simplify the life of everyone, make 
people more aware of the IESG work and probably increase global efficiency?
jfc

---

From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 07 May 2005 14:46:57 -0400

>>>>> "Dave" == Dave Crocker <[email-masked]> writes:

    Dave> 2. The AD raising the Discuss must post the details of their
    Dave> concern to the mailing list targeted to that specification

The proto team has already decided on a conflicting approach: the
proto shepherd is ultimately responsible for collecting discuss
comments and forwarding them to the right list.

I think there are some good reasons for this decision.  I believe the
proto team has already solicited public comment and received a fair
bit.  It is my opinion at least that the community supports their
approach.

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 7 May 2005 12:26:58 -0700

Sam,

>  comments and forwarding them to the right list.

Here I was, thinking that proto was simply moving some administrative details 
down to the working group, rather than creating an enforced, protective 
barrier between an individual with veto authority and the recipients of that 
veto.

<Sidebar>
  Yes, I know the term veto is inflammatory.  What folks on the IESG need to 
understand is just how inflammatory the problem is, to lowly IETF 
participants, when it occurs.  It has been an occasional problem since the 
beginning of the IETF and it occurs often enough to indicate a structural 
problem.  It boils down to an inappropriate use of authority, no matter what 
its intention might be.  From a practical standpoint, the issue with this 
problem is the excercise of an absolute authority; that authority is, in the 
purest sense, a veto.  And we need to be careful about claiming that there is 
a way to override the veto, given that it has not been used; hence there is 
not existence proof for its being a meaningful way to reverse a veto.)
</Sidebar>

In fact that is all they are doing. We have been doing a version of this 
pretty much forever. Indeed, proto really IS merely moving that task from the 
cognizant AD to the wg chair (or whoever.) 

So it is not "conflicting" with the change being discussed here, except to the 
extent that it continues an established model and we are talking here about 
changing that model.
 
This model does not work for any interesting case, making the shepherd 
responsible for mediating an interaction that is nearly always complex and 
often vague.  It is exactly the sort of interaction you do NOT want to have 
somebody in the middle of. You want the principals to interact directly.

>  bit.  It is my opinion at least that the community supports their

This, of course, is the problem with having such fundamental changes 
marginalized into a working group that competes with all others for 
participation.

In this case, I've no doubt there is support for moving an existing practise 
off of an AD and down to the wg.  

That does not have anything to do with whether there is support for 
*retaining* this model, rather than require more direct communication.

  d/
  ---
  Dave Crocker

---

From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 07 May 2005 15:53:19 -0400

>>>>> "Dave" == Dave Crocker <[email-masked]> writes:

    Dave> Sam, 2. The AD raising the Discuss must post the details of
    Dave> their concern to the mailing list targeted to that
    Dave> specification
    >>  The proto team has already decided on a conflicting approach:
    >> the proto shepherd is ultimately responsible for collecting
    >> discuss comments and forwarding them to the right list.

    Dave> Here I was, thinking that proto was simply moving some
    Dave> administrative details down to the working group, rather
    Dave> than creating an enforced, protective barrier between an
    Dave> individual with veto authority and the recipients of that
    Dave> veto.

No, that's not what I said.  I said that the proto shepherd is
responsible for sending the comment to the appropriate place.  If the
add holding the discuss wants to send it to the mailing listthat's
fine.  If the working group wants to send mail to the AD that's fine
too.

One of the reasons you might want to do things this way is that you
might have a bunch of related discusses that you want to send to the
mailing list all at once.  I can think of other reasons the proto team
might not want to require the AD holding the discuss send the message
to the WG.  I don't really care that much.  My goal in writing to you
was to let you know that your proposal disagreed with something and to
suggest who you might want to talk to in order to resolve that
disagreement.

I'm not on the proto team; this particular issue is not something I
care that much about either way.

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 7 May 2005 13:32:44 -0700

>  responsible for sending the comment to the appropriate place.  

As I said, that's been standard practise forever.  It's been done by the 
cognizant AD and proto is proposing it be done by someone else, but the task 
is not changed.

>If the

More than one of us has tried to describe the nature of the problem and its 
solution yet we seem not to be heard.  

Let me try the simplest summary possible:  

   If someone has the authority to block the long-term work of a group of IETF 
participants, they have an *obligation* to take their concerns directly to 
those participants and engage in a direct process to resolve it.

Authority always comes with responsibility.  In this case it should simply be 
that the authority to block a group has a responsibility to interact with that 
group.

Directly.

  d/
  ---
  Dave Crocker

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 8 May 2005 12:24:11 +0100

> that the authority to block a group has a responsibility to interact 

Seems eminently reasonable to me.
Even seems practical not to mention good professional etiquette.

I find it hard to understand why an AD would not behave this way 
(though I know it is not the common practice).

I have always felt that authority entailed obligations and 
responsibility.  And the more power a position has the more constrained 
the holder of that position should be in his or her behavior.

a.

---

From: Margaret Wasserman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 8 May 2005 08:25:50 -0400

Hi Dave,

>that the authority to block a group has a responsibility to interact with that

This seems pretty reasonable to me, and I think that this is one of 
the reasons why the IESG (pre-me) chose to implement the I-D tracker. 
I agree that it might be even better to generate mail to the WG 
mailing list (some folks may read the list but not follow documents 
in the tracker), but I'm not sure about the best way to implement 
this...

The most common place where I personally block and/or delay a WG 
document is AD Review.  I only issue discusses on a small fraction of 
the documents that come to the IESG, but I return AD review comments 
(blocking or non-blocking) on a much higher fraction of the documents 
that I am asked to shepherd.

For some time, I have been sending my AD review comments to the WG 
mailing lists, rather than just to the authors and WG chairs, and it 
seems to work quite well.  I also copy those comments into the 
tracker, so that folks who are interested in the status of the 
document can find them.

Most of the time, my AD review comments don't spark any debate, but I 
think that doing this allows the WG to argue with me if they disagree 
with my comments.  It also helps to improve visibility into how/why 
the document is being modified after the WG has declared it "done". 
I think that this practice may also  increase WG awareness of the 
fact that there is now an action item for their editor, and that 
public scrutiny may result in the editor turning the document around 
more quickly (I have no statistics to back this up, it is just an 
impression).

I think that it would also be helpful to send IESG discusses and 
comments directly to the WGs (for all of the same reasons), and there 
are two ways that I think we could accomplish this:

(1) When an AD has an open discuss that he or she does not clear 
during the telechat, he or she could send a copy of that discuss to 
the WG mailing list directly.  This is quite direct, but might be a 
bit tricky in practice due to spam filters, etc. because the AD may 
not be a member of the mailing list in question.  It is also more 
likely to suffer from human error or omission, because the tracker is 
set-up to show us the documents for which we are responsible AD, not 
those for which we currently hold discusses.

- or -

(2) After the document appears on a telechat, the responsible AD 
could send any remaining IESG discusses and comments to the WG 
mailing list (probably in a single message), cc:ing the ADs who 
entered those discusses or comments.  I sometimes do this already, 
and it typically seems to work well.  If folks think that it would be 
useful (for efficiency or visibility), I'd be happy to start doing it 
for every one of my documents that still has discusses open after the 
telechat.  This approach would also resolve an outstanding issue with 
the PROTO process, by making it clear when it is time for the WG 
chairs to start working to resolve the discuss issues.  This approach 
is somewhat less direct, but perhaps more practical than option (1). 
It may be subject to some human error, but the AD will see the 
document in an "IESG Review" stage each time he or she enters the 
tracker, so he or she will have an opportunity to notice his or her 
omission.

- or -

(3) We could modify the I-D Tracker so that it will send mail to the 
mailing list at one of two points: (a) whenever anyone enters a 
discuss position, or (b) whenever a discuss position remains after 
the documents has been on a telechat.  This is both indirect and 
impersonal, but not subject to human error.

Thoughts?  Do other people think that it would help (efficiency or 
visibility) for all discusses to be sent to the WG mailing lists? 
Any thoughts on which of the three approaches above would work better?

Margaret

---

From: Bill Fenner <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 8 May 2005 10:51:10 -0700

> those participants and engage in a direct process to resolve it.

Dave,

  From my point of view, there are two assumptions that the IESG makes
in this situation:

1) Since the responsible AD (or PROTO shepherd) is more familiar with
the working group / document / other work / etc, they will be able to
more effectively communicate the concerns.
2) The AD that registered the DISCUSS is always willing to actually
have a discussion directly with the WG or authors if necessary.

However, I think that the community tends to see instead:

1) The discussing AD is hiding behind a shield
2) The discussing AD isn't willing to communicate with the WG

I've certainly seen responses to discusses that I've filed come back
as "Well, I don't think this is reasonable, but I've made this change
to satisfy the IESG," even though I would have been willing to have
the discussion and yield to the WG's/authors' opinion.

I do think that #1 is solving a real problem - I'm pretty sure that
WGs/authors would rather get one message summarizing all of the IESG's
issues rather than 10 messages from different individuals that might
have overlapping issues, etc.  However, if it's perpetuating the myth
that ADs aren't willing to talk to the WGs/authors, we need to do
*something* about it.

  Bill

---

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 8 May 2005 15:11:25 -0500

> Any thoughts on which of the three approaches above would work 

OK, let me see if I understand the problem -

- the ADs probably aren't members of every mailing list for a document 
that they may vote DISCUSS on, and

- the mailing lists are often not set up to allow posting by 
non-members

I really like the idea of working through DISCUSS comments on working 
group mailing lists. This method seems to place more responsibility on 
the community, which I also like.

Do we need to figure out how an AD can participate in a discussion on 
a mailing list they aren't subscribed to, in order to make this work?

Spencer

p.s. I'm also wondering how many active WG mailing lists are hosted on 
ietf.org, versus living somewhere else in cyberspace - most of the WGs 
I participate in are hosted there, but YMMV...

---

From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 08 May 2005 17:38:44 -0400

>>>>> "Spencer" == Spencer Dawkins <[email-masked]> writes:

    Spencer> - the mailing lists are often not set up to allow posting
    Spencer> by non-members

That's a violation of policy.  Please see the IESG statement on spam
policy; someone needs to be approving non-member postings for IETF
working group lists.

I think it is quite doable to work through discuss comments on the
list.  I don't completely agree that ADs should be sending the initial
mail or that all discuss comments should make it to the mailing list,
but I do agree with the general principle.  Here are some things to consider:

1) It is probably desirable to aggregate comments together.  It's
   probably desirable  to include some general text letting a working
   group know what a discuss is and that they can push back,
   especially for first documents.  Margaret's suggestion for mail to
   the wg copied to discussing ADs seems like a fine way to address
   this.

2) It is reasonable to let the shepherding AD and if desired the proto
    shepherd have a chance to respond to the discuss before the WG.
    This is not a requirement but I do think it will make things flow
    more efficiently.  Certainly I'd say that not all discusses should
    make it to the WG list before the telechat.  This is true
    especially when one of the shepherds plans to push back on the
    discuss. 

3) IF the shepherding AD or proto shepherd cannot understand the
   discuss it is almost certainly worthwhile to get clarification
   before bringing it to the WG.

4) Many discusses are resolved with rfc-editor notes in a fairly
   efficient process.  We should be careful of changing this; we don't
   want to slow down document approvals.  It's probably desirable to
   let the WG know what if any changes are made in an rfc-editor note.
   It's probably reasonable for this to happen after document approval
   if the document gets approved fast enough; if a real problem
   develops in confirming WG consensus for such a change, we have a
   bit of time before the rfc editor publishes.  We can revisit if the
   rfc editor starts getting fast enough that they publish within a
   week of IESG approval.

--Sam

---

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 8 May 2005 16:53:01 -0500

Sorry, I was imprecise.

From: "Sam Hartman" <[email-masked]>

> policy; someone needs to be approving non-member postings for IETF

"allow posting without manual intervention" - the mailing lists I've 
administered for IETF had two settings, "allow posting by non-members" 
and "hold postings by non-members for approval".

What I was trying to say was, this is probably sufficient for first 
feedback, but probably not sufficient for actually discussing a 
DISCUSS comment.

I've copied non-members asking for their feedback on technical 
questions a couple of times, and the discussion between people 
directly addressed and the rest of the mailing list gets badly 
of-of-sync very quickly, because directly addressed participants start 
responding to postings before they are approved, even with the most 
diligent mailing list admins.

Have a great day,

Spencer

---

From: Pekka Savola <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 15:18:33 +0300 (EEST)

On Sun, 8 May 2005, Margaret Wasserman wrote:
> (1) When an AD has an open discuss that he or she does not clear during the 
> telechat, he or she could send a copy of that discuss to the WG mailing list 
> directly.  This is quite direct, but might be a bit tricky in practice due to 
> spam filters, etc. because the AD may not be a member of the mailing list in 
> question.  It is also more likely to suffer from human error or omission, 
> because the tracker is set-up to show us the documents for which we are 
> responsible AD, not those for which we currently hold discusses.
>
> - or -
>
> (2) After the document appears on a telechat, the responsible AD could send 
> any remaining IESG discusses and comments to the WG mailing list (probably in 
> a single message), cc:ing the ADs who entered those discusses or comments.  I 
> sometimes do this already, and it typically seems to work well. 
[....]

Both of these are problematic, because they add more work to people on 
the IESG.

I'd support the document shepherd (NOT either shepherding AD or the AD 
writing the discuss) being responsible for initiating the dialogue. 
If the comments by different ADs don't overlap, each AD's comments 
should be discussed separately.

-- 
Pekka Savola                 "You each name yourselves king, yet the
Netcore Oy                    kingdom bleeds."
Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings