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 Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http:// www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt. The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. 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 Alvestrand Expires October 14, 2004 [Page 1] Internet-Draft Cross Area Late Review April 2004 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 Alvestrand Expires October 14, 2004 [Page 2] Internet-Draft Cross Area Late Review April 2004 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"? Alvestrand Expires October 14, 2004 [Page 3] Internet-Draft Cross Area Late Review April 2004 Intellectual Property Statement The IETF takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any intellectual property or other rights that might be claimed to pertain to the implementation or use of the technology described in this document or the extent to which any license under such rights might or might not be available; neither does it represent that it has made any effort to identify any such rights. Information on the IETF's procedures with respect to rights in standards-track and standards-related documentation can be found in BCP-11. 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This document and the information contained herein is provided on an "AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION Alvestrand Expires October 14, 2004 [Page 4] Internet-Draft Cross Area Late Review April 2004 HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Acknowledgment Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the Internet Society. Alvestrand Expires October 14, 2004 [Page 5]