Subject: [mpowr] SUMMARY: Should we form a WG?

From: Margaret Wasserman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Jan 2004 14:55:01 -0500

This message summarizes the first sub-discussion under the
MPOWR WG Proposal thread:

(1) Should we form a WG to move some responsibility and
authority from the IESG to WGs or WG chairs?

The IESG originally proposed that we consider formation
of a WG in this area in a message posted to the IESG
list and re-posted to [email-masked].

Scott Bradner (posting on the solutions list, later
quoted on this list by Pete Resnick) indicated that he
did not see consensus that shifting authority or
responsibility from the IESG to WGs or WG chairs was
a good idea, but that he did think that having this
discussion in the context of a WG would be reasonable.

John Klensin stated that a wide-participation mailing list
is a better forum for judging IETF consensus than a narrowly
focused WG.  He suggested that an IESG-driven process to
perform "triage" on community-generated ideas with IETF-wide
Last Calls for any document changes would be preferable to
a WG.  He pointed out that many of the suggested changes
are already within the authority current assumed by the IESG.
Lars-Erik Jonsson posted his agreement.

Ted Hardie pointed out that the changes that have been
proposed on the 'solutions' mailing list fall into two
categories:  those for which the IESG can "just do it",
and those that require more community involvement to be
successful.

Margaret Wasserman and Harald Alvestrand both commented
that the IESG, in isolation, does not have the perspective,
ability and/or authority to make all of the decisions
regarding what type of changes are needed to fix the
problems facing the IETF.

Keith Moore posted that (a) we should not form a WG with
a pre-conceived goal of moving authority and responsibility
to WG chairs and (b) we should not fragment the task of
fixing the problems facing the IETF across multiple WGs.
Instead, we should pursue a bottom-up approach focused on
doing better engineering of protocols.

Pete Resnick posted that a WG was a "phenomenally bad
idea".  He indicated that the IESG already has the authority
to give chairs more responsibility and should do so.  A
WG would only delay execution.

This leads to two conclusions:

(1) We have rough consensus among those who have been
active in this discussion that the IESG can and should take
unilateral action, within the bounds of the process BCPs,
to make changes that the IESG believes will improve the
scalability, openness and/or effectiveness of our process.

Many people supported the idea of this type of unilateral
IESG action.  (John Klensin, Pete Resnick, Margaret Wasserman,
Ted Hardie, Harald Alvestrand, Lars-Erik Jonsson).  No one
disagreed.

This is somewhat fortunate, as the IESG is already taking
some steps in this area.

(2) We have not reached any consensus about whether or
not a WG in this area is a good idea.

Several people posted in support of forming a WG in this
area (Margaret Wasserman, Scott Bradner, Harald Alvestrand,
Ted Hardie, John Loughney).  Several people also posted
against starting a WG in this area (John Klensin, Keith Moore,
Pete Resnick, Lars-Erik Jonsson).  Since this only represents
a small portion of the people on this mailing list, it would
be good to hear from others!

IMO, it is worthwhile to continue this discussion.  In
particular, we need to determine what (if any) clarification
or changes are required to our BCPs that can't (or shouldn't)
be accomplished through unilateral IESG action.  It would
also be useful to circulate a strawman charter to help focus
further discussion.

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