One document matched: draft-alvestrand-icar-xarea-00.txt

Network Working Group                                      H. Alvestrand
Internet-Draft                                             Cisco Systems
Expires: October 14, 2004                                 April 15, 2004


                         Cross Area Late Review
                     draft-alvestrand-icar-xarea-00

Status of this Memo

   This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with
   all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
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   This Internet-Draft will expire on October 14, 2004.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2004). All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

   This document gives an outline of a way to put together review teams
   for documents in late review (pre-approval time). It is intended as
   input to the ICAR WG.

   Comments are welcome, and can be directed to the editor or to the
   ICAR mailing list <icar@ietf.org>










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1. Introduction

   This document shows one way to structure late review of documents..

   The structure proposed is one where we constitute cross-area teams
   where one team carries out the complete review of a document before
   approval.

1.1 Team Organization

   For each IETF area, a "review team", charged with review of documents
   in one area, is constituted.

   Each "review team" is headed by an "area supervisor" selected by the
   ADs for the area, and consists of one member selected by the ADs for
   each other area, and one member selected by the IAB.

   ALTERNATE MODEL: Instead of aligning the reviewers with IETF areas
   (which have many reasons for existence, but coverage of problem space
   is not one of them), we could imagine picking a list of "problem
   areas" (formalities, security, manageability, scalability,
   congestion, internationalization....) and pick a reviewer for each
   such "problem area" for the team.

1.2 Document approval process

   The review team for an area is charged with doing cross-area final
   review of documents, and ensure that documents conform to the
   published requirements for the IETF publication form that working
   group and standards-track documents are held to, as well as being
   useful for the Internet.

   If a review team has consensus on approving a document, the document
   gets passed to the IESG with the team's recommendation.

   If the review team has consensus on returning it to the WG, their
   decision is final (unless appealed to the IESG).

   If a review team is unable to reach consensus on a document, the
   document may be forwarded to the IESG for a final decision.

1.3 Discussion

   Among the important properties of the IETF is that the leadership is
   in daily touch with the stuff being worked on, and that the final
   technical approval rests in the hands of people with a wide range of
   perspectives, all grounded in a common vision for the Internet.
   This is something we have achieved today, by centralizing all process



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   oversight and final approval to the IESG, and something we do not
   want to lose.

   This reviewing process attempts to preserve this by keeping document
   review cross-area. It does separate the role of reviewer from the
   role of IETF leadership - this means that the task of selecting (and
   motivating) reviewers is rather important, and is rather lightly
   covered in this document.

   Finally, it attempts to reduce the overall review load on individual
   IESG members.

   Problems:

   o  The number of people we trust with making decisions grows by a
      rather large amount.

   o  The training that happens today on the IESG is that people watch
      other people do review, and learn a lot from that, including
      level-setting on the difference between "important" problems and
      "unimportant" problems.

   o  The learning effect of having to review documents from many
      different areas is substantial. If we review only docs from a
      single area, that's lost. A suggestion to circulate members
      between areas might help that, but also reduces consistency
      between review cycles when the membership of the review team for
      an area changes.

   o  The issue of different review teams giving different feedback is
      important. Consistency is not something we want to lose.

   o  If we improve the review this much, are we increasing people's
      tendency to "leave the nit-finding to the review", or are we
      encouraging them to "engineer to a known quality level"?
















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Intellectual Property Statement

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   BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION



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   HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
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Acknowledgment

   Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the
   Internet Society.











































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