Proto Team A. Falk
Internet-Draft H. Levkowetz
Expires: August 18, 2005 D. Meyer
February 14, 2005
The PROTO Process: Working Group Chair Document Shepherding
draft-ietf-proto-wgchair-doc-shepherding-04
Status of this Memo
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Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2005).
Abstract
The methodologies described in this document have been designed to
improve and facilitate IETF document flow processing. A set of
processes and procedures, known as the PROTO process, are specified
in which a working group chair serves as the primary document
shepherd for a document which has been submitted to the IESG for
publication. Note that this role has traditionally been filled by
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the AD responsible for the working group.
The shepherd's responsibilities include:
1. Providing the write-up accompanying a document that is forwarded
to the IESG for publication. Note that this write-up had
traditionally been provided by the "Shepherding Area Director".
Under the processes and procedures described here, the working
group chair provides this write-up.
2. Following up on AD Evaluation comments to the authors and working
group, and
3. Following up on all IESG comments ("DISCUSSes") related to the
shepherded draft.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3. Process Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.1 WG Chair Write-Up for Publication Request . . . . . . . . 5
3.2 AD Review Shepherding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.3 IESG Discuss Shepherding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4. When Not to Use PROTO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
6. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
7. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
8. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
A. Working documents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Intellectual Property and Copyright Statements . . . . . . . . 14
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1. Introduction
Early in 2004, the IESG undertook several experiments aimed at
evaluating whether any of the proposed changes to the IETF document
flow process would yield qualitative improvements in document
throughput and quality. One such experiment, referred to as PROTO
[PROTO], is a set of methodologies designed to involve the working
group chairs more directly in their documents' approval life cycle.
In particular, the PROTO team focused on that part of the document's
life cycle which occurs after the working group and document editor
would have traditionally forwarded the document to the IESG for
publication.
The methodologies developed and piloted by the PROTO team (hereafter
referred to as the "PROTO process" or simply "PROTO") focus on the
working group chair as the primary document shepherd. In this
context, the shepherd's responsibilities include:
1. Providing the write-up accompanying a document that has been
forwarded to the IESG for publication. This write-up had
traditionally been provided by the "Shepherding Area Director".
Under PROTO, the Working Group Chair provides this write-up.
2. Following up on AD Evaluation comments to the authors and working
group, and
3. Following up on all IESG comments ("DISCUSSes") related to the
shepherded draft.
By the end of 2004, the IESG had evaluated the utility of the PROTO
methodologies based on data obtained though several pilot projects
which had run throughout the year, and subsequently decided to adopt
the PROTO process.
The primary objective of the PROTO process is to improve document
throughput and quality by enabling a partnership between the
Responsible Area Director and the Shepherding Working Group Chair (or
her/his designee). In particular, this partnership has the explicit
goal of empowering the Shepherding WG Chair while at the same time
offloading a specific part of the follow-up work which had
traditionally been responsibility of the Responsible Area Director.
As such, PROTO has been scoped to include both the follow-up after
the Responsible Area Director has read through and evaluated a
document submitted to the IESG for publication, as well as follow-up
on all IESG comments on a document (i.e., DISCUSSes). Finally, it is
important to note that PROTO does not cover follow-up for drafts
which do not originate in a working group.
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The remainder of this document is organised as follows: Section 3
outlines the overall PROTO process. Section 3.1 describes the
write-up which accompanies the publication request, Section 3.2
describes the AD Review shepherding process, and Section 3.3
describes IESG Discuss Shepherding. Finally, Section 4 describes
those cases in which the PROTO process should not be used.
2. Terminology
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14, RFC 2119
[RFC2119].
3. Process Description
The PROTO process involves Area Directors of selected areas, and some
or all of the chairs for which the Area Director is Area Advisor.
The PROTO process is divided into three tasks:
o Doing a WG Chair Write-Up for a document (Section 3.1),
o Following up on AD review comments (Section 3.2), and
o Following up on IESG DISCUSS comments (Section 3.3)
3.1 WG Chair Write-Up for Publication Request
When a draft is ready to be submitted for publication, it is the task
of the Shepherding WG Chair to do a document write-up for the draft.
There are two parts to this task. First, the Shepherding WG Chair
answers questions 1.a to 1.h below to give the Responsible Area
Director insight into the working group process as applied to this
draft. Note that while these questions may appear redundant in some
cases, they are written to elicit information that the AD must be
aware of (to this end, pointers to relevant entries in the WG archive
will be helpful). The goal here is to inform the AD about any issues
that may have come up in IETF meetings, on the mailing list, or in
private communication that they should be aware of prior to IESG
evaluation of the shepherded draft. Any significant issues mentioned
in the questionnaire will probably lead to a follow-up discussion
with the AD.
The second part of the task is to prepare the "Protocol Write-Up"
which is used both for the ballot write-up for the IESG telechat and
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for the the IETF-wide protocol announcement. Item number 1.i
describes the elements of the write-up. Please see other protocol
announcements in the IETF Announce archive for examples of such
write-ups.
1.a) Have the chairs personally reviewed this version of the Internet
Draft (ID), and in particular, do they believe this ID is ready
to forward to the IESG for publication?
1.b) Has the document had adequate review from both key WG members
and key non-WG members? Do you have any concerns about the
depth or breadth of the reviews that have been performed?
1.c) Do you have concerns that the document needs more review from a
particular (broader) perspective (e.g., security, operational
complexity, someone familiar with AAA, etc.)?
1.d) Do you have any specific concerns/issues with this document that
you believe the ADs and/or IESG should be aware of? For
example, perhaps you are uncomfortable with certain parts of the
document, or have concerns whether there really is a need for
it. In any event, if your issues have been discussed in the WG
and the WG has indicated it that it still wishes to advance the
document, detail those concerns in the write-up.
1.e) How solid is the WG consensus behind this document? Does it
represent the strong concurrence of a few individuals, with
others being silent, or does the WG as a whole understand and
agree with it?
1.f) Has anyone threatened an appeal or otherwise indicated extreme
discontent? If so, please summarise the areas of conflict in
separate email to the Responsible Area Director.
1.g) Have the chairs verified that the document adheres to all of the
ID nits? (see http://www.ietf.org/ID-Checklist.html).
1.h) Is the document split into normative and informative references?
Are there normative references to IDs, where the IDs are not
also ready for advancement or are otherwise in an unclear state?
(note here that the RFC editor will not publish an RFC with
normative references to IDs, it will delay publication until all
such IDs are also ready for publication as RFCs.)
1.i) For Standards Track and BCP documents, the IESG approval
announcement includes a write-up section with the following
sections:
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* Technical Summary
* Working Group Summary
* Protocol Quality
1.j) Please provide such a write-up. Recent examples can be found in
the "protocol action" announcements for approved documents.
1.k) Note:
* The relevant information for the technical summary can
frequently be found in the abstract and/or introduction of
the document. If not, this may be an indication that there
are deficiencies in the abstract or introduction.
* For the Working Group Summary: Was there anything in WG
process that is worth noting? For example, was there
controversy about particular points, decisions where
consensus was particularly rough, etc.
* For the protocol quality, useful information includes:
+ Are there existing implementations of the protocol?
+ Have a significant number of vendors indicated they
plan to implement the specification?
+ Are there any reviewers that merit special mention as
having done a thorough review (i.e., that resulted in
important changes or a conclusion that the document
had no substantive issues)?
The questionnaire and write-up is sent to the ADs and
iesg-secretary@ietf.org with a request to publish the document. The
questionnaire and write-up, minus any discussion of possible appeals,
is also sent to the working group mailing list. The publication
request SHOULD also indicate which chair will be shepherding the
document (this will be entered into the ID Tracker [IDTRACKER]). In
addition to making life easier for the ADs, this lets the IETF chair
know where to send Gen-ART [GEN-ART] reviews.
3.2 AD Review Shepherding
The steps for working group chair shepherding of AD reviews are as
follows:
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2.a) If there is more than one chair, the chairs decide on which one
should be responsible for ensuring that the needed fixes are
done when the AD returns comments. This MUST be done before the
publication request is sent, so that the information can be
included in the request, as mentioned above. This MUST be an
explicit agreement among the working group chairs.
2.b) The AD reads, evaluates and comments on the draft (as is the
case when not using PROTO).
2.c) Depending on the magnitude of the issues found, the AD returns
the full review to the chairs, and requests that either:
* Further editorial work must be done on the document before
it can be published, or,
* ID Nits must be fixed before the document before it can be
published, or
* A revised draft is is required to resolve issues that have
been found in subsequent IESG review.
As covered below, the comments will be posted to the working
group mailing list. The comments will normally also be posted
by the AD in the ID Tracker [IDTRACKER]. Working groups that
use issue tracking should also record the issues (and eventually
their resolution) in the issue tracker.
2.d) The Shepherding WG Chair reads through the AD Evaluation
comments, making very certain that all comments are understood,
so that it is possible to follow up on them with the authors and
working group. If there is some uncertainty as to what is
requested, this must be resolved with the Area Director.
2.e) The Shepherding WG Chair sends the comments to the author(s) and
to the working group mailing list, in order to have a permanent
record of the comments. It is recommended that the chair
solicit from the author(s) an estimate on when the fixes will be
done, that is, when the revised draft can be expected.
2.f) When incorporating the fixes in the new version of the draft, it
is strongly RECOMMENDED that the editor keep a list showing how
each issue was addressed and showing what the revised text is.
It is strongly RECOMMENDED that this list be forwarded to the
Responsible Area Director with the revised draft.
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2.g) The Shepherding WG Chair iterates with the authors (and working
group if required) until the outstanding issues have been
resolved and a revised draft has been submitted. At this point,
the AD is notified and provided with the summary list of issues
and resulting text changes.
In the event that the working group disagrees with a comment
raised by the AD or has previously considered and dismissed the
issue, the Shepherding WG Chair MUST resolve the issue with the
AD before a revised draft can be submitted.
2.h) The Area Director verifies that the issues he found during AD
Evaluation are resolved by the new version of the draft.
2.i) The shepherding process normally terminates at this point.
However, in the event that no resolution can be found, the
process goes to 1. above (i.e., essentially restarts).
3.3 IESG Discuss Shepherding
In this section we detail the steps that a Shepherding WG Chair will
take in resolving the DISCUSS items against a given ID. The steps
are given below, in the order that they are to be executed. Note
that occasionally DISCUSSes are written in a manner that makes their
primary intent unclear. In these cases, the Shepherding WG Chair
(and possibly the document editor) and DISCUSSing AD SHOULD meet
(either in person or electronically) to resolve the issue. In
addition, the Responsible Area Director SHOULD be notified of the
meeting. If this process fails to clarify or resolve the DISCUSS,
the Shepherding WG Chair MAY further involve the Responsible Area
Director in the resolution process.
3.a) Immediately after the weekly IESG conference call, the
Shepherding WG Chair queries the ID tracker [IDTRACKER] to
collect any DISCUSS comments raised against the ID. In order to
accomplish this, the Shepherding WG Chair's email address is
added to the "State Change Notice To:" field in the ID tracker.
This will result in an email to the Shepherding WG Chair when
the document changes state from the "IESG Evaluation" state to
one of the states requiring Shepherd actions (i.e., "IESG
Evaluation: Revised ID Needed", "IESG Evaluation: AD Followup").
This notification indicates to the the Shepherding WG Chair that
the DISCUSS comments have been registered.
Note that there may be exceptional cases when DISCUSS comments
are registered after the IESG teleconference. In these cases,
the DISCUSSing AD should notify the Shepherding WG Chair that
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new comments have been entered.
3.b) The Shepherding WG Chair analyses comments from the tracker, and
initialises contact with any AD's who have placed comments
(blocking or non-blocking) on the draft that is being
shepherded. In particular, the Shepherding WG Chair MUST notify
the relevant ADs that the Shepherding WG Chair is the current
document shepherd. Note that the Responsible Area Director MUST
be copied on this correspondence.
+------+ Comments +--------+ Comments +-------+
| (3.a)| ------------> | (3.b) | -------------> | (3.c) |
+------+ Collected +--------+ Understood +-------+
/|\ |
| | Comments not fully understood
| | (Further AD/Shepherding WG
| | Chair Discussion Required)
| |
+----+
3.c) The Shepherding WG Chair then coordinates DISCUSS comments, and
builds a a consistent interpretation of the comments. This step
may require iteration with step (2). above. That is:
+------+ Consistent +-------+
| (3.b)| ---------------> | (3.c) |
+------+ Interpretation +-------+
/|\ |
| | Further AD/Shepherding WG
| | Chair discussion required
+--------------------------+
3.d) The DISCUSS comments are then communicated to the working group.
3.e) After the author(s) resolve the issues provided by the
Shepherding WG Chair (i.e., the summarised DISCUSS issues), the
Shepherding WG Chair reviews the updated document to ensure that
(in her/his option) the DISCUSS issues have been resolved.
Note that the Shepherding WG Chair may also propose resolutions
to these issues, file them in an issue tracker, or do other
steps to streamline the resolution of the comments.
3.f) The Shepherding WG Chair communicates the resolution-so-far to
the responsible AD and the DISCUSSing AD(s).
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3.g) DISCUSSing AD removes DISCUSS comment, or tells the Shepherding
WG Chair and adds information to the ID tracker explaining why
the comment is not resolved. The Shepherding WG Chair informs
the working group accordingly.
If the DISCUSS comment in question was not resolved to the
satisfaction of the DISCUSSing AD(s) and Responsible Area
Director, two possibilities exist:
(a) The process returns to step (3.c), or
(b) If no progress can be made on the resolution of the DISCUSS
with the DISCUSSING AD, despite clarification and
additional involvement of the Responsible Area Director,
the Shepherding WG Chair and the WG might at last resort
consider an appeal in accordance with the procedures
described in RFC 2026 [RFC2026] and referred to in RFC 2418
[RFC2418].
Otherwise, the process continues with step (3.h).
3.h) The Responsible Area Director moves document to APPROVED state,
or if the changes are deemed significant, there may be a new WG
last call. Finally, the document goes to the full IESG for
re-review.
4. When Not to Use PROTO
As mentioned above, there are several cases in which the PROTO
process SHOULD NOT be used. These include
1. Those cases in which the WG chair primary document author or
editor, or the WG chair is the primary author or editor of a
large percentage of the documents produced by the working group,
2. Those cases in which the Responsible Area Director expects
communication difficulties with the WG chair (either due to
experience, strong views stated by the chair, or other issues),
and
3. Those cases in which the working group itself is either very old,
losing energy, or winding down. i.e., those cases in which it
would not be productive to initiate new processes or procedures.
Finally, note these guidelines are intended to help the Responsible
Area Director determine when to use the PROTO process. The final
determination as to whether to use the PROTO process or not is left
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to the Responsible Area Director's discretion.
5. Security Considerations
This document specifies a change to IETF document flow procedures.
As such, it neither raises nor considers protocol-specific security
issues.
6. Acknowledgments
This document is the product of PROTO team, which includes authors as
well as Allison Mankin, Bill Fenner, Barbara Fuller, and Margaret
Wasserman.
7. IANA Considerations
This document creates no new requirements on IANA namespaces or other
IANA requirements.
8. Informative References
[RFC2026] Bradner, S., "The Internet Standards Process -- Revision
3", BCP 9, RFC 2026, October 1996.
[RFC2028] Hovey, R. and S. Bradner, "The Organizations Involved in
the IETF Standards Process", BCP 11, RFC 2028, October
1996.
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
[RFC2418] Bradner, S., "IETF Working Group Guidelines and
Procedures", BCP 25, RFC 2418, September 1998.
[IDTRACKER]
"The IETF Draft Tracker", Web
Application: https://datatracker.ietf.org/, 2005.
[PROTO] "The IESG Process and Tools (PROTO) Team", Web
Page: http://psg.com/~mrw/PROTO-Team, 2005.
[GEN-ART] "The General Area Review Team (GEN-ART)", Web
Page: http://www.alvestrand.no/ietf/gen/review-guidelines.
html, 2005.
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Authors' Addresses
Aaron Falk
Email: falk@isi.edu
Henrik Levkowetz
Torsgatan 71
Stockholm S-113 37
SWEDEN
Phone: +46 708 32 16 08
Email: henrik@levkowetz.com
David Meyer
1225 Kincaid St
Eugene, OR 97403
USA
Phone: +1.541.346.1747
Email: dmm@1-4-5.net
Appendix A. Working documents
(This section should be removed by the RFC editor before publication)
The current working documents for this draft are available at this
web site:
http://ietf.levkowetz.com/drafts/proto/wgchair-doc-shepherding/
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Acknowledgment
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