IAB and IESG B. Carpenter Internet Draft October 1997 Improved Working Group Coordination Abstract draft-iab-wgannounce-00.txt This is a proposal for a pragmatic way to improve working group coordination between various standards-related organisations, by use of a shared mailing list for early announcement of new activities. Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft. 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.'' To learn the current status of any Internet-Draft, please check the ``1id-abstracts.txt'' listing contained in the Internet- Drafts Shadow Directories on ds.internic.net (US East Coast), nic.nordu.net (Europe), ftp.isi.edu (US West Coast), or munnari.oz.au (Pacific Rim). Carpenter Expires April 1998 [Page 1] Internet Draft Improved Working Group Coordination October 1997 Proposal A number of organisations develop technical specifications or standards related to the Internet. Especially in the upper protocol layers, the areas of interest often overlap between two or more organisations. It is therefore in everyone's interest that when new activities are started in a given organisation, the others know about it. This is not intended to cause forced marriages of working groups, or interference by one organisation in another, but just to ensure that everyone will know where liaison and coordination is needed. This proposal has been deliberately kept as simple and easy as possible, with the intention of being trivial to implement and operate. The proposal is that an ad hoc email list should be created, e.g. new-work@ietf.org . Each participating organisation would supply approximately two email addresses to be added to this list. [Examples for the IETF could be the IAB Chair and the IETF Executive Director]. It is suggested that these addresses should be individuals rather than mailing lists, to avoid email difficulties with multiple layers of distribution lists. Each participating organisation would undertake to send an ASCII message to this list *prior to* deciding to start a new standardisation effort related to the Internet. That is all; there is no other formal obligation. The addressees in each organisation are expected to distribute these messages within their own organisation as relevant. They should follow up any case where there appears to be an issue of coordination or liaison, using any suitable procedures. The granularity of this will depend on each organisation and will be determined by each organisation. [An example for the IETF would be to send each draft WG Charter or charter update to the list, or, for JTC1, each NWI submission. For organisations with quasi-permanent working groups, it would be necessary to send a message for each new major work item.] In cases where complete specifications are being fast-tracked by one of the participating organisations, the warning message should be sent at the earliest possible stage, before formal processing has started. The initial list of organisations invited to join this system is (in alphabetical order) DAVIC ECMA ETSI IETF ITU-T JTC1 OMG TOG W3C The list can of course be expanded, but should not include organisations of purely national or otherwise very limited scope, and should only include organisations that actively produce Internet- related technical specifications. Lower layer fora (ATM, Frame Relay, ADSL...) are not included because they generally have simple one-to- one relationships with Internet standards from the IETF alone. Carpenter Expires April 1998 [Page 2] Internet Draft Improved Working Group Coordination October 1997 Security considerations It would be preferable if the authorised senders to the list used a common method of email authentication. Acknowledgements The IAB and the IESG contributed to this proposal. Author's Address Brian E Carpenter Internet Division IBM United Kingdom Laboratories brian@hursley.ibm.com MP 185, Hursley Park phone: +44 1962 816833 Winchester, Hampshire SO21 2JN, UK fax: +44 1962 818101 Carpenter Expires April 1998 [Page 3]