Re: Reacting to previous messages

[Fred Baker <fred@cisco.com>]

At 03:53 PM 6/1/99 -0400, Cheng-Yin Lee wrote:
>What i'm puzzling over now is how are proposed WGs actually evaluated.
>Could someone enlighten me, pls?

Well, from the Tao of the IETF:

Each area has several working groups. A working group is a group of people
who work under a charter to achieve a certain goal. That goal may be the
creation of an Informational document, the creation of a protocol
specification, or the resolution of problems in the Internet. Most working
groups have a finite lifetime. That is, once a working group has achieved
its goal, it disbands. As in the IETF, there is no official membership for
a working group. Unofficially, a working group member is somebody who is on
that working group's mailing list; however, anyone may attend a working
group meeting (see the Be Prepared section below). 


In a nutshell, the IESG is looking for a group of people who has:
 - a problem they need to solve that can be stated clearly
 - a plan for solving it on s defined schedule
 - a level of technology that is ready for standardization
 - Leadership that the IESG trusts to do something useful on a schedule
   (I didn't say "good old boy", but we get accused of that)

The IESG's experience with technologies stated as "well, maybe we'd like to
try a different approach" is that maybe they try something out, maybe it
will be different, and maybe it will be better - and then again, maybe not.
I think if the present IESG had been faced with DVMRP, PIM, CBT, and MOSPF
as a set of new technologies, it might have asked the operations folks
whether they wanted the technology, looked at the alternatives (which were
at the time nothing to write home about), and determined that IP Multicast
was itself a region where much experimentation was in order - in a research
network - and sent it off to the IRTF, as it did Reliable Multicast. It
might have simply encouraged people to work on it on heir own for a while,
as it did LDAP Policy. The problem ("send a message once but let it have
multiple deliveries, but at most one to any given system") can be clearly
stated, but it's not obvious that the technology was ready for standardization.