Subject: [dns-dir] proposed agenda for Maastricht dns-dir meeting

From: Peter Koch <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Jul 2010 20:36:55 +0200

Dear members of the DNS Directorate,

this is a proposed agenda for the upcoming DNS Directorate Meeting in
Maastricht.  It is composed of two parts, one focussing on progress,
the other on an architectural question.

Looking back a couple of months, there has not been much activity on the
list and both the attempts to schedule face-to-face meetings at IETFs
as well as holding in-between conference calls have not been too successful.
There have been several automatic submissions from Olafur's "EW" system and
also some requests for review forwarded to the dns-dir list, with little
response in total.  This suggests that the DNS directorate is not
contributing to the document quality in a way it was supposed to and
we should try to examine whether the Directorate works in a way the
responsible ADs would like it to.

One observation is that key personnel in the DNS community has, over the
last maybe 9 months, been extremely bound by DNS related dayjob duties,
which is both reflected by actual progress at the DNSSEC front at the
root and elsewhere, but also by the lower presence or contribution level
on working group mailing lists.  This may or may not change over the
upcoming months.

Another observation is that with DNSSEC going production and with
IDN TLDs in the root as well as IPv6 around the corner, the core protocol
and recent extensions are done or about done, open work items in
both DNSEXT and DNSOP nonwithstanding.  What remains is the use of the
DNS in other working groups, but again with several building blocks
available (see RFC 5507 for examples), this might not be a bigger issue.
Patrik's posting earlier today (see below for a link) as well as the
experience of individual directorate members working in non-DNS WGs
might suggest otherwise, but that is a separate topic.

It is probably time to review the role of the DNS Directorate as a whole
and the role of the individual members and here are three potential
ways forward:

1) Close the DNS Directorate as moribund

2) Expand the membership of the DNS Directorate to be something more like
   a committed review pool, like secdir, OPS-DIR or GenART; this would basicly
   respond to ADs' requests for DNS specific reviews in I-Ds on or
   before the IESG's agenda

3) Expand the directorate like (2), but also address pro-actively
   architectural issues (see above) and advice to WGs where asked for

The other topic for the agenda is the re-occuring issue of "service
discovery" and "service location" through the DNS and - tied to that - the
continuous re-invention of (sometimes badly shaped) wheels, as touched
in <http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/apps-discuss/current/msg01614.html>,
but addressing this makes more sense after a discussion about the meta issue.

Andrew & Peter