Subject: Re: AD Review of draft-ietf-bfd-seamless-use-case

From: Jeffrey Haas <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 2015 13:17:21 -0400

Loa,

On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 12:46:58PM +0800, Loa Andersson wrote:
> >Adopting the document within the WG basically means the working group "owns"
> >the document and that we're motivated to get work on it done.  This includes
> >things like tracking it via a milestone.
> 
> We talk about this as taking over the revision control. The motivation
> point is important, when a document stops being individual and becomes a
> working group document, there is a real difference for the authors /
> editors.

This one is mostly a matter of organizational "ownership".  Individuals are
of course welcome to publish within the IETF, but most standards obviously
are products of the "working group".  While that's often many of the
original authors, it's really the contribution of the whole group that
provides support.

> >Not all WG documents will be published as RFCs.
> >
> yes but that does not necessarily stop them from being wg documents.
> Actually the status of wiki text is a bit ambivalent, at least if it is
> possible for anyone to change it (that is often what is said to be the
> benefit of the wiki).

Wikis are useful for stuff that needs to be up to date, but less so for
something that needs to cross the border from timely to authoritative.

Use cases are a good example when they should be a living document.
However, use cases tend to die out once the proposal has gotten to a certain
portion of its lifetime, except perhaps as a historical curiosity.  The
proposal moves from being something you talk about doing to something people
say "this is the tool we use to <do thing>".

One thing wikis would be very helpful for that we don't utilize as well as
we should is a document roadmap or architectural overview.  Some WGs publish
such things periodically, especially once their corpus of documents becomes
large.  Our tools are very poor at providing such relationships.

> Actually between the wg doucments page, the wg milestones and wiki-based
> material, I frequently find that the document page need everything I
> need, if maintained properly. The rest is mostly redundant.
> 
> Over a year and half I worked very hard to maintain milestones and found
> that this was extra work, the document pae, including document history
> give me what I need.

I've found somewhat the opposite, and this is why I try to maintain the WG
wiki for document status.  When I "peek into" a WG I'm unfamiliar with and
haven't tracked the mailing list or sessions for, it's hard to tell in the
sets of dozens of documents what has support, what people are doing, whether
the document is getting active work, etc.

To give an in-WG example, the cryptographic extensions to BFD is work that
has been adopted, is likely correct at this point in time, but doesn't have
strong support to ship in vendor products yet.  Since the WG would prefer
some sort of proof of concept that it works, the documents are stalled.
This story is hard to determine from the datatracker.

-- Jeff