Re: Working group moving forward?

Jim Whitehead wrote:
> ...
>>My take on what I've seen in the last several months of the 
>>WebDAV working group is that if there was to be a BOF session 
>>today, I don't see any way that a working group would get 
>>approved.
> 
> 
> Irrelevant. In 1996 there was a clear and present need for an interoperable
> web authoring standard. At that time, the WebDAV BOF had a standing room
> crowd. Of course there would be fewer people today, just as it would be hard
> to have a broadly attended FTP BOF, or Telnet BOF. We're not in that phase
> of development. We're in completion mode, not ramp up mode. It's never
> exciting to dot the final "i" and cross the final "t".

But, on the other hand, it's necessary. The Subversion guys just spent a 
lot of energy trying to design (and partly implement) support for a 
specific locking feature (lock null resources) that this WG has 
deprecated several years ago; yet all the (well, some) implementors see 
is RFC2518.

>>As far as where we are now, some of the current drafts might 
>>make much better progress as individual submissions.
> 
> 
> This is very unclear. The progress of individual submissions in the RFC
> editor's queue, once they have received IESG approval, is glacial. They
> never turn into RFCs. Working group documents fare much better in terms of
> responsiveness.

Data point: I submitted 
<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-reschke-webdav-property-datatypes-08.html> 
to the RFC Editor on Sept, 27, 2004 (almost 6 months ago). It's now at 
position 19 out of 36 entries in the state "INDEPENDENT SUBMISSIONS 
UNDER RFC EDITOR REVIEW", of which the oldest ones are from 2002). Note 
that this is just a waiting queue, not really a publication queue -- 
once it get's through this queue, it will be sent back to the 
Applications Area Director (right now Ted Hardie).

>>Keep in mind that in the current process the WG chair has to shepard 
>>WG drafts through.  As much as editors may not like this, it 
>>means that you have to get at least one WG chair fired
>>up enough about your draft to take on this responsibility. 
> 
> 
> A Chair assumes certain duties when they take on the position of Chair. 
> 
> I do not see any process RFC that states that document authors are required
> to generate enthusiasm in their Chairs.

In particular, I'd argue that a draft being on the WG's charter SHOULD 
generate enough enthusiasm to help it getting through the process... 
Alternatively, the chairs should update the charter.

> I think the WebDAV Working Group can very usefully serve two more purposes,
> neither of which needs to take much time.
> 
> 1) Complete BIND.
> 2) Complete Quota.
> 
> Both are very close to completion. Once these two are done, then it seems
> reasonable to disband WebDAV WG. Given how close these two documents are to
 > ...

In which case we should also discuss what's the best way to make 
progress on RFC2518bis outside a WG.


Best regards, Julian

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Received on Saturday, 19 March 2005 10:34:48 UTC