RE: how to deal with liaison statements

[Fred Baker <fred@cisco.com>]

Personally, I'd like to see if we can integrate liaison statements into our 
processes in a normal and natural way. ITU is asking us to be like them in 
sending letters around; it is fair play to ask them to be like us in 
presenting messages to our working groups.

A very natural way to handle liaison statements, I think, would be to

 - post them somewhere the day they are received in a universally readable
   format (eg, if it comes as a .doc, post the .doc and a .pdf of same)
   I don't see a strong reason that this posting should have a lifetime in
   excess of the lifetime of an internet draft; liaisons are temporary
   documents.

 - send an email to the working group chair copying the alias saying
   "at URL mumble please find a note from <whoever> that they would like
    you to see"; this would be a secretariat function. The subject line
   of said email should perhaps be the title of the liaison document,
   for thread management purposes. The contact points of the liaison
   should be copied on the email for inclusion in the topic thread.

 - any documents referred to in the liaison must be publicly available in
   formats that are universally readable. That doesn't imply that they have
   to be on our site; we'd prefer they weren't. If documents are sent as
   attachments on the email, however, they should be posted along with the
   liaison itself using the same document format conventions and lifetime
   rules. If there are issues of copyright, they can be dealt with using
   standard legal language in the document. If there are issues of
   confidentiality, that is the other organization's problem, not ours. We
   don't respond to things they can't post.

 - The working group chair might at his/her discretion invite the contact
   folks to comment during the appropriate get-together.

 - if the liaison calls for a response, the format of the response should
   be dictated by the IETF, not the requesting organization. They don't
   listen to our comments on document format either. I suspect that the
   response should be either an email from the chair; that email may refer
   to appropriate RFCs or posted internet drafts. If they want to copy the
   documents to their sites, that is their option.