General comments for Proposed Chapter 7

Here are some general comments re the proposed Chapter 7 ...

* The proposal includes useful editorial cleanup and simplifications but 
suffers from some organizational issues as captured in Issue-59.

* I like the elimination of Proposed Recommendation. [If AC reps are 
interested in a spec, they should be engaged much earlier in the process 
than PR. Additionally, PRs are mostly opaque to WG and require quite a 
bit of `make work` for Editors.]

* In practice, I don't think the elimination of LC or combining LC and 
CR [depending on how one spins the gist of the proposal] provides a 
significant improvement, and as I stated last June, it appears to just 
create a bunch of new issues. F.ex. it appears a new process will be 
needed re "what is Wide Review, how are Reviews done, who is responsible 
for doing what" (which, IMHO is precisely the point of LC as defined in 
Process-20051022).

* As far as I can tell, the gist of the LC+CR proposal can be achieved 
within the context of Process-20051022. The underlying issue the 
proposal appears to try to address is "how to prevent a spec from 
entering the dreaded LC->CR->LC->CR->... cycle". Of course the proposal 
doesn't eliminate the cycle problem (a spec can still have a 
LCCR->LCCR->... cycle), it just appears to "shift" the problem.

* Rather than change LC and CR, it seems like it would be more effective 
to attack the cycle problem via Education and Outreach f.ex. create Best 
Practices that describe the cycle problem, provide guidance on how to 
avoid the problem, encourages early testing, encourages early 
implementations, etc. (Very few new WGs are created each year and if the 
new WG Chair(s) is inexperienced, the Team should provide extra support 
to the group to make sure they understand the potential `gotchas` and 
how to avoid them.)

* Assuming the proposal moves forward, rather than implement it 
across-the-board, perhaps it would be useful to have a "candidate" 
period to work out the kinks. It might also be useful to limit the trial 
to a small set of WGs that agree to test the proposal.

(Did anyone ever compare Process-20051022 versus the proposal with real 
data?)

-AB

Received on Wednesday, 27 November 2013 13:32:27 UTC