Subject: Suggestion on a BCP specific WG...

From: "todd glassey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 09:37:42 -0800

Not that you folks take suggestions from me - but there would be a
tremendous value in creating a specific BCP WG that was a permanent part of
the IETF to manage the collection and IP issues within BCP's.

BCP's are an important part of moving-forward with IP management within the
IETF and it seems to me that they are so important that they need to be
elevated into a forum of their own rather than just being specific to the WG
that they were originally spawned or derived in.

The point is that there is a legal liability with publishing a formal
document called a "Best Current Practice" which deserves a very formalized
process for creating and verifying that the documented method that is being
attested to in the BCP is in fact really the Best Current Practice or its
just someone's idea of something that wanted to call BCP.

This would specifically exclude in the charter of this new WG, and BCP
Program Documents from the IPR or Governance WG's. This new 'repository WG'
would be responsible for protecting the IETF's good name in the publishing
of BCP's

The first deliverables would be a set of documents to define how the IETF's
BCP program works and how those BCP's are made available to other Standards
Processes for their commentary and ratification or adoption.

My feeling is that much of the commercial processes for handling say PKI
frameworks - like the ER's Trusted Signature Use directives and compliance
processes with that would fall into this new WG. The configuration and
management or user's guides would also fall under this umbrella as well.

>From a Governance Model this costs the IETF nothing to do really and puts
all of its documents which are likely to be expired in a time-weighting
model by the Industry, in a single place where they can be managed later.

Todd Glassey

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From: "Joel M. Halpern" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 18:14:54 -0500

A) BCPs have an issue date.  They are the best current practice at 
the time of issue.  There is no requirement that we maintain them, 
although we like to.
b) There is, as far as I can tell, no intellectual property issue 
relative to BCPs that needs to be managed by anyone.
c) There is not any issue I know of to manage with the "collection" of BCPs.

Yours,
Joel M. Halpern

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From: "todd glassey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 16:14:27 -0800

Response-

No Joel - you are dead wrong IMHO. The IETF doesnt get to redefine the
Industry Term BCP to mean 'some document we publish'. BCP is an accepted
Industry Acronym for a document specific to how some practice is done at
some specific point in time and it is only valid for the period of that time
and the window of how often its 'refreshed or updated'.

So there most certainly is a requirement to maintain and keep the BCP's
current otherwise the name is wrong - they are NOT BCP's but statement's
about a practice at a specific instance in time. This is not something the
IETF gets to change, or to create a 'confusing term to imply this document
is something that it is not' -  its how documents are dealt with in the real
world and in the Audit Community we know this already.

BCP's need a management practice and process to assure they are always
current. This also brings into play that the IETF doesn't have any way of
really terminating something that it published that needed to be withdrawn
from circulation for whatever reason.

Todd Glassey

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From: Joe Touch <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 12:51:28 -0800

todd glassey wrote:
> Industry Term BCP to mean 'some document we publish'.

We use the term "Request for Comments" when after last call for input.

We use the term "Standard" when we have no official compliance process.

We are not industry, we are the IETF ;-)

What we mean when we use the term BCP - and have for a number of years -
is our decision, as with Standard or anything else.

Joe