Subject: RE: Possible new Real-Time Applications and Infrastucture (RAI)Area

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2005 00:02:19 +0300

Bill,

>On Fri, 2005-09-16 at 14:36, [email-masked] wrote:
>> If there was a way to lighten-up the IESG review process, then this 
>> would be a good idea. For example, having a single DISCUSS per Area 
>> would be one way to reduce this could be one solution.
>
>Why do you think this would make any difference in practice?  
>chances are that an AD-pair would agree to hold a DISCUSS if 
>either felt that an issue should block publication.

What I meant was that the IESG spends a lot of time on document review.
I don't think anyone has complained that there is not enough document
review.  If we add more ADs, then we will be increasing the amount
of document review.  Is this something we should need?  I think David
put it quite well that scheduling IESG calls, meetings and retreats
is already problematic - adding more ADs will not improve things.

Would a re-organization of the current set of areas solve the same
thing?
If the problem is that certain WGs are not getting enough management
time, then would increased usage of Technical Advisors (which is already
done) improve things?  

My read of most of the current responses on this thread is that the SIP
& related working groups are feeling pressure in the current Transport
Area, so some re-arrangement is needed.  What I haven't seen is how
having more ADs involved would actually improve things.

John

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From: Lakshminath Dondeti <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 14:35:21 -0700

>I don't think anyone has complained that there is not enough document

I for one think that there is not enough document review some times.  For 
instance, in some cases we have long running discussions on a number of 
issues that get resolved in the mailing list and the people involved don't 
take the time to thoroughly review documents (I am as guilty as the next 
person) because, I guess they are tired of looking at the same document 
again and again.  The end result is that we have documents in the RFC Ed 
queue with another document in the wings called draft-blah-clarifications 
(some people might be able to guess what I am referring to -- no offense 
intended to the people who put the long hours to do that work -- it is the 
reviewers that are at fault).

>is already problematic - adding more ADs will not improve things.

I am curious about the scheduling issues.  If the IESG job is a "full-time" 
job, why can't the people on IESG find time to meet with each other, f2f or 
in telecons; perhaps someone will help me understand that.  The other issue 
that comes up is time zones.  We've had this in the Nomcom and I found out 
recently that telecons at odd hours is the norm if you work in some 
SDOs.  I think these should be non-issues really.

Perhaps the IESG job description should say in part, "you are expected to 
work some 35-40 hours a week on IESG stuff, should keep your calendar open 
in the months of ... for a retreat, and should be able to participate in 
telecons at odd hours."  If you remove IESG from that sentence, it probably 
is already in many IETFers' job descriptions.

regards,
Lakshminath

---

From: David Kessens <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 17:49:00 -0700

Lakshminath,

> is already in many IETFers' job descriptions.

I think you have a reasonable understanding of the amount of time
involved and issues with time zones.

I think we should step away a bit from the word full time for the IESG
job. We recently discussed this in the IESG and it was felt my most of
us that a time commitment of at least 30 hours per week is needed,
while many ADs spend more than that. Whether people than find even
more time to do additional work is not really our problem as long it
doesn't affect IESG performance.

Many of our scheduling problems are related to timezones as you
already guessed: in practice we have a 8am-11am window (Pacific Time
Zone) that we can use for calls in the morning (from my perspective
and assuming that I am not traveling ;-)).

Other issues are our different expertises: eg. I am the OPS AD and
feel that it is quite important to show up at various fora where
operational people show up like NANOG, Apricot and RIPE. I bet that
the Security Area Directors have their own security conferences etc.
that they feel that are important to attend. In addition, despite the
fact that many of us spend most of our time on the AD job, many of us
occasionally have a need to show up at our company headquarters.

Other issues include things like if you need to schedule something
with X people also X people need to respond and progress on finding a
common time is only as fast as the last person who reacts. And the
larger the group, the more likely this last person is quite late due
to various reasons from vacations, illness or to just being extra busy
during business travel.

Basically, trying to coordinate times that we can all be available is
often already challenging and results in scheduling meetings further
in the future than we would like to.

Note that is just one of the issues, there are many issues that occur
in the dynamics of a large group, whether is scheduling or simple
things like finding a problem on a conference call bridge where one
line causes a lot of noise which clearly takes a lot more time to
debug when the group is larger. And all these issues together are
decreasing our overall efficiency up to a point where things get
extremely hard to get any work done (see Harald's mail for a nice
explanation).

David Kessens
---

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From: Lakshminath Dondeti <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 18:01:51 -0700

Thanks David.  Please see inline:

>and assuming that I am not traveling ;-)).

I have a bi-weekly 7-9 PT standards telecon and my colleagues would like me 
at the office before we dial-in to the conf calls.  I am not a morning 
person, but so far I was able to make to those meetings, but time will tell.

I thought about this while nomcom telecons were going on.  Perhaps a 
rotating schedule which makes it convenient in various time zones might 
help (for instance if someone in PT -- or worse some TZs in Asia -- 
volunteers for IESG, they don't have to tell themselves that they have to 
wakeup early for 2, 4 or 6 years!)  The rotation may result in people 
missing meetings when there is a change, but it is probably worth a try.  A 
weighted fair timezone scheduling algorithm is a good research topic for 
someone with a lot of free time :-).

>occasionally have a need to show up at our company headquarters.

Ok, I managed to forget this when I wrote my previous message.  (I have 
seen some ADs at other meetings I go to, so I shouldn't have).

I guess I see it better now, but still think this is not an IETF-only 
problem and other people are making it work and so we should be able to as 
well.  Do you guys share each others' calendars?  That seems to help here 
at work.  Someone has override authority to schedule meetings that need a 
large number of people with similar conflicts as above to attend.

best,
Lakshminath

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From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2005 10:28:42 +0300

Hi Lakshminath,

> The end result is that we have documents in the RFC Ed queue with 
> another document in the wings called draft-blah-clarifications

I'm plotting the growth rate of draft-blah-clarifications, and my 
current estimate
is that it will exceed the size of draft-blah-original before 
draft-blah-original
becomes an RFC.

(But we are in deep trouble if the only part of the organization that does
reviews is the IESG.)

> I am curious about the scheduling issues.  If the IESG job is a 
> "full-time" job, why can't the people on IESG find time to meet with 
> each other, f2f or in telecons; perhaps someone will help me 
> understand that.  The other issue that comes up is time zones.  We've 
> had this in the Nomcom and I found out recently that telecons at odd 
> hours is the norm if you work in some SDOs.  I think these should be 
> non-issues really.
>
> Perhaps the IESG job description should say in part, "you are expected 
> to work some 35-40 hours a week on IESG stuff, should keep your 
> calendar open in the months of ... for a retreat, and should be able 
> to participate in telecons at odd hours."  If you remove IESG from 
> that sentence, it probably is already in many IETFers' job descriptions.

This isn't a comment on the scaling issue (I think it needs to be 
considered)
but I'm a bit surprised that the above isn't already a part of the job
description... The Internet is important, and we should not treat the
management of its technical direction as a hobby that you do on
top of your day-time job. Maybe in some special cases, but not as
general rule.

--Jari

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2005 13:44:30 +0200

> Hi Lakshminath,
...
> top of your day-time job. Maybe in some special cases, but not as

I don't think anyone takes this on as a hobby (if they do, they didn't
read the mail from the Nomcom). But I would advance a principle:

"Leadership positions should be defined such that the workload is
compatible with other employment and personal life. Very few leadership
positions should require effective full time work."

IMHO, if we can't meet this, it is extremely unlikely that Nomcom will
be able to find enough candidates.

      Brian

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2005 14:03:36 +0200

[email-masked] wrote:
...
> having more ADs involved would actually improve things.

More parallelism in the steering activities of the 6 ADs replacing
four previous ones.

    Brian

---

From: C Wegrzyn <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2005 11:06:36 -0400

A few days ago I put out an email that asked the question - indirectly -
about what exactly is RAI? I see a lot of discussion about
administrative things but I still haven't seen an answer to my question.
Perhaps I am not entitled to ask it but then I wonder exactly about
having an open list.

I think before anything gets done at least it should be crystal clear as
to exactly what RAI is? Working in the SIP, IM and iSCSI world I am
wondering exactly, if these aren't real-time protocols I guess I am
missing something? Are you thinking that these are all put in there? Are
you talking about making them more aware of the need to be sensitive to
lag and other things? Exactly what is RAI?

Chuck Wegrzyn

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2005 17:43:08 +0200

Apparently you aren't on the IETF announcement list. All IETF participants
really need to be there.

http://www.ietf.org/maillist.html to join the list and find
the archive.

    Brian

---

From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2005 00:10:14 -0400

>>>>> "john" == john loughney <[email-masked]> writes:

    john> Bill,
    >>> If there was a way to lighten-up the IESG review process, then
    >>> this would be a good idea. For example, having a single
    >>> DISCUSS per Area would be one way to reduce this could be one
    >>> solution.

    john> What I meant was that the IESG spends a lot of time on
    john> document review.  

As I've said before this is actually not the part of the IESG job I
would attack if I wanted to decrease IESG load.

We get fairly efficient at doing this job.  
It does take time though.

    john> I don't think anyone has complained that
    john> there is not enough document review.  If we add more ADs,
    john> then we will be increasing the amount of document review.

Honestly I don't think more document review would be harmful.  I would
not focus on adding more document review at the final IESG review
layer, but I would not be sad if it happened.

One of two things will happen.  Either the discusses you get will
describe real problems that need to be fixed.  If that's the case then
we should fix these problems.

Alternatively we'll get discusses that the informed community
consensus ends up concluding are inappropriate.  In that case we
should work on removing these discusses and training IESG members.
That's true regardless of whether we add IESG members.  That problem
is also very important to fix even if we don't add IESG members.

Now, one thing we do get with a new area is more review of documents
earlier in the process and more active involvement of ADs in technical
management.  Many people believe that is needed; I am one of them.

As such, I believe the benefits of the new area to the IETF community
outweigh the costs.

--Sam