Loa, On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 12:46:58PM +0800, Loa Andersson wrote: > >Adopting the document within the WG basically means the working group "owns" > >the document and that we're motivated to get work on it done. This includes > >things like tracking it via a milestone. > > We talk about this as taking over the revision control. The motivation > point is important, when a document stops being individual and becomes a > working group document, there is a real difference for the authors / > editors.
This one is mostly a matter of organizational "ownership". Individuals are of course welcome to publish within the IETF, but most standards obviously are products of the "working group". While that's often many of the original authors, it's really the contribution of the whole group that provides support. > >Not all WG documents will be published as RFCs. > > > yes but that does not necessarily stop them from being wg documents. > Actually the status of wiki text is a bit ambivalent, at least if it is > possible for anyone to change it (that is often what is said to be the > benefit of the wiki). Wikis are useful for stuff that needs to be up to date, but less so for something that needs to cross the border from timely to authoritative. Use cases are a good example when they should be a living document. However, use cases tend to die out once the proposal has gotten to a certain portion of its lifetime, except perhaps as a historical curiosity. The proposal moves from being something you talk about doing to something people say "this is the tool we use to <do thing>". One thing wikis would be very helpful for that we don't utilize as well as we should is a document roadmap or architectural overview. Some WGs publish such things periodically, especially once their corpus of documents becomes large. Our tools are very poor at providing such relationships. > Actually between the wg doucments page, the wg milestones and wiki-based > material, I frequently find that the document page need everything I > need, if maintained properly. The rest is mostly redundant. > > Over a year and half I worked very hard to maintain milestones and found > that this was extra work, the document pae, including document history > give me what I need. I've found somewhat the opposite, and this is why I try to maintain the WG wiki for document status. When I "peek into" a WG I'm unfamiliar with and haven't tracked the mailing list or sessions for, it's hard to tell in the sets of dozens of documents what has support, what people are doing, whether the document is getting active work, etc. To give an in-WG example, the cryptographic extensions to BFD is work that has been adopted, is likely correct at this point in time, but doesn't have strong support to ship in vendor products yet. Since the WG would prefer some sort of proof of concept that it works, the documents are stalled. This story is hard to determine from the datatracker. -- Jeff
