I personally encouraged the merger. The alternative was a beauty contest. We have experience with such things, and none of them are good experiences. All of the candidate protocols had several things to commend them to the work group. All of them had faults that were significant to more than a few participants.
I was very happy that all three of the leading candidate protocols merged. The merger was messy. It was uneven. It was not pleasing to ANY of the authors. I talked to them about that before the meeting. None were happy. They made that clear in the meeting. They did think that the merger was a good idea, and they were confident that they could get a good protocol, and a good protocol document, in relatively short order. We knew there was opposition. The opposition did not ask for agenda time. We made some anyway. We asked for supporters of alternatives to come forward. The SEP proposers want to make sure their ideas will be considered in what ever protocol is brought forward. We have asked them several times if they wish to have SEP considered as the candidate protocol, or as ideas to be incorporated. They have always indicated the latter choice. There was a great deal of discussion on the list that P2PP should be considered instead of the merged protocol. However, when it came time to propose that formally, there was silence. If someone had proposed that, they would have been in the awkward position of being against the authors of the P2PP protocol, who are part of the merged protocol author team. However, no one proposed that we consider P2PP. The only protocol on the table currently is the merged protocol. The authors are free to do whatever they want, but I for one don't expect to see a complete rework of the merge (i.e. I don't expect to see it look like P2PP with additions). I expect to see a more polished, readable document that pretty much follows the design in the document now, with attention paid to specific issues raised at the meeting and on the list. Cullen does wear the AD dot. In my dealings with him in p2psip since he became an author, he has ALWAYS behaved as an individual contributor. Jon Peterson is the AD for this work group. Jon has been interested in progress, and generally positive in the direction we were going, but he has not, to my knowledge, pressured anyone to do anything. It is a complete mischaracterization to claim any AD pressure. You can claim that there was chair bias towards a merged protocol; I specifically asked for the merger to happen, and I'm happy that it did. You can't claim, I believe, that we unfairly handle the issue. We invited alternatives, let the debate run on over its scheduled time, and reworded hum "text" to suit participants. That's the process. Chairs are allowed to encourage competing voices to come together, and are allowed to support the result. They must be fair to any dissenting voices. I believe that is what happened. Personally speaking, I am very disappointed in the outcome. What we have is delay. Instead of being able to move forward in many different dimensions, we have to wait. We'll try for list consensus after the merged protocol has another draft. It may be that everyone is happy, or it may be that some alternative takes the work group by surprise. I am very pessimistic that we can discern consensus entirely on the list. That means we are going to lose an entire cycle, until Dublin. I believe the delay is not recoverable; the end date is set back. Let me cite a specific example. If we had a protocol document as a work group item, it would have made sense to have an interim meeting to work on two or three big items, say: data model and routing. Without it, I believe an interim meeting won't work: we'd be consumed with the present debate, and something like this level of discontent cannot reasonably be settled in an interim because participation is too limited. Another example: I had hoped to elicit volunteers to start work on torture tests, interoperability testing rigs, service examples and other accoutrements that, in the SIP experience, tended to follow deployments instead of lead them. That will have to wait until there is a protocol to work from. Nevertheless, the process did what it was supposed to do. We looked for consensus, didn't find it, and have a work plan going forward. It was a fairly good IETF moment, even if I was very disappointed. If we voted, the outcome could well have been different. If we held meetings that went on well into the next morning, and then voted, who knows what could have happened. Instead, the work group split, and the result was "do more work and we'll try again". So yes, we encouraged authors to come together. They did, thankfully. We did not "strong arm" anything. Brian -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dean Willis Sent: Friday, March 14, 2008 11:12 AM To: Spencer Dawkins Cc: P2PSIP Mailing List; Jon Peterson Subject: Re: [P2PSIP] Just to be clear... On Mar 14, 2008, at 10:17 AM, Spencer Dawkins wrote: > I really AM thinking that RELOAD-04 will be adopted as a working > group item > after it is submitted (under whatever name is finally chosen). > > Is anyone expecting something else to happen? > Since it is my apparent self-appointed role to point out the elephants in the room . . . There are people who feel that RELOAD is being "strong-armed" (coerced by people with procedural authority) into place. I've personally heard this perception expressed by several working group participants, even though I don't have the same perception. This sort of problem happens anytime a candidate draft has contributor support from a chair, area director, or area technical advisor (and RELOAD has all three!). The WG's only counter is to be meticulous about the application of process and propriety with respect to such a draft. The relative unreadability of the hastily merged RELOAD draft makes comparing and discussing the merits/demerits of the proposal against alternatives difficult. Strong pressure from the chairs, ADs, and area technical adviser to adopt the draft in the light of this "difficult to compare and discuss" condition aggravate the perception of being "strong-armed" I believe that a more mature draft will eliminate the argument that debate on the technical issues is too difficult. So once we have a better draft, people will either have good technical arguments against the proposal or will be willing to accept the proposal as a consensus position. In the end, I expect that the RELOAD draft will be accepted as the WG baseline document. But we need to more-than-fairly exercise the process to get there if we want the working group to continue to move smoothly. -- Dean _______________________________________________ P2PSIP mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/p2psip _______________________________________________ P2PSIP mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/p2psip
