Hi Wes, My concerns may not be identical to Bill's.
I support the suggestion that the co-chairs do a consensus check on the statements Bill mentioned. The co-chair's - now Tony is the sole chair - rely on our support for publishing the draft as an RRG RFC, and will test that with an online poll. I think we all know the potential problems of of such arrangements, but its the best which can be done in a self-selected group such as this, with on formal membership. So I think it is right that serious questions about the nature of the RFC be discussed, with a consensus test initiated by the chair if more than a few people express support for something contrary to the current plans of the chair. I support Bill's view that it is best the chair initiate any such consensus test. If someone else initiates a poll, then the results are of debatable value, since not everyone would be motivated to participate who would be motivated to participate in a proper consensus check poll initiated by the chair. I don't think it would be disastrous for the draft to be finalised as it is, to be the "RRG Recommendation", which is ~95% useful material on 15 proposed architectures, and ~5% the co-chairs' recommendation. By "useful" I mean informative and helpful for people in the near term and longer term future who want to understand the alternatives and do their own evaluations. The recommendation is quite brief and not very well explained or argued. Its value is that it is the carefully weighed judgement of two people with long experience in this field. However, I think its value is limited because the recommendation is so brief, because there is little or nothing on the goals they hope to achieve, and because in the absence of them detailing their goals, the current version of the Design Goals is old and likewise brief and inadequate. (I plan to write my own "alternative RRG Design Goals" I-D - looking at this massive global IT system upgrade more comprehensively and in more detail than is favored by the chair.) The value of the co-chairs' recommendation will diminish over time as new architectures are developed and as those which were discussed in this phase of the RRG are improved, developed, or found to be wanting and abandoned. The value of the summaries etc. will also diminish over time, but they tell the reader much more about the various architectures strengths and weaknesses than the co-chair's recommendation. I think it would be better to put their recommendation in a different RFC from the RFC which contains the material on the 15 proposed architectures, and call the latter RFC the "RRG Report" or "Summaries and Critiques of RRG Candidate Architectures" or whatever. The authorship of these two items is quite different. The co-chairs alone are the authors of their recommendation. The summaries and critiques etc. are the work of the people who actually designed and proposed new architectures, and of some of the people who wrote critiques of these architectures. The bulk of the current draft is not a recommendation - it is a summary of the work done by many, but unfortunately not all, of the most active and constructive members of the group over the last 3 or so years. The recommendation does not come from the RRG as a group. It only formally comes from the RRG by way of the co-chairs deciding to use their defined ability to do things as they wish. That's fine, but the recommendation does not come from vast majority of RRG participants. Nor does it have the support of the vast majority of the RRG participants. To bundle the RRG group's major single collective work, which is not a recommendation, under the title "RRG Recommendation" does not seem right to me. Furthermore, given the apparent misunderstandings the co-chairs seem to have had about the candidate architectures in March, when they decided on their recommendation: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rrg/current/msg06373.html I would argue that their recommendation is not based very much on the main body of the current draft - the summaries, critiques and counterpoints of the 15 candidate architectures. This is a second reason for separating the recommendation into a different document from these summaries etc. Although the draft is perfectly clear that the recommendation is from the co-chairs alone, I think its placement after all the summary etc. material gives an impression that it was well informed by that material. It think such an impression is not as true as it would ideally be. - Robin _______________________________________________ rrg mailing list [email protected] http://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/rrg
