Subject: RE: WG next steps

From: "Tony Li" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 13:42:33 -0800

|   > - develop a roadmap for how we are going to select 
|   possible areas to
|   >   work on, and how work needs to proceed in each area in order to
|   >   ensure that we have (and continues to have) the 
|   necessary concensus
|   >   for the work from the constituancies that will be 
|   impacted and will
|   >   need to implement any changes.
|   
|   About the roadmap: I think it would be useful at this stage 
|   for people
|   to write up their ideas as drafts. I think the wg membership is
|   competent enough to find the most significant weak points in each
|   proposal. If all of this is documented, we can simply 
|   arange the pieces
|   in such a way that the least amount of space remains uncovered by a
|   solution and then come up with the glue to hold it all together and
|   start fleshing out the solutions.

I would suggest that we NOT go down the path of writing everything
up as drafts.  That is hardly the best way to collaborate and 
immediately brings to the surface all of the ego issues involved in
having "my" proposal vs. "your" proposal.

I would suggest instead that the WG chairs select one person to act
as 'editor' for the WG's proposal.  That we discuss issues here and
come to rough consensus before we write things down formally.  The
WG chairs will need to be active in setting the technical agenda
and driving us to closure.  The editor will have to drive people to
actually contribute text.  The editor needs to be someone with the
time to put into this, someone who can be impartial, very comfortable
with proper English grammar, and yet firm enough to get results from
volunteers.

This is the way that the IETF *used* to work and it certainly made
more progress than we seem to be making now.

Tony

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From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 23:57:49 +0100 (CET)

On Wed, 13 Nov 2002, Tony Li wrote:

> |   for people to write up their ideas as drafts.

[...]

> having "my" proposal vs. "your" proposal.

I'm still relatively new to all of this, so I'll take your word for it.

But is there a different way to get coherent, self-consistent proposals
on the table? Much of what we've seen on this list the past weeks has
been very interesting, but never concrete enough to really do anything
useful with, other than generate ideas or measure it against everyone's
individual idea of what the IP architecture should look like in the
future.

> with proper English grammar, and yet firm enough to get results from

At least I don't have to worry here. If nothing else, even when I get it
right I'm never comfortable with English grammar...

> more progress than we seem to be making now.

Sounds good, although first trying to get a better picture of the new
architecture might not be a bad idea either.