Re: Liaison handling (Re: IAB comments on draft-baker-liaisons-00.txt)

[Stephen J Trowbridge <sjtrowbridge@lucent.com>]

Randy,
> btw, what does ituX have for tracking tools?  how does ieee track
> issues and documents with ansi, iso, ...?  (it's been almost two
> decades since i was on sc22 tag, and things have likely grown a
> lot and my mind has rotted considerably in that time).
ITU-T is still highly manual for these things. Up to about 3 years
ago, we only dealt with liaison statements at full Study Group meetings.
The individual liaison statements would appear as temporary documents
in everyone's pigeon holes (physical mailbox) at the beginning of the
meeting. The SG and WP chairmen would prepare tables assigning
responsibility for the liaison statements down to the Rapporteur
group level. At the closing plenary, we would check that we had
responses for everything that needed one and approve the outgoing liaison
statements.

Since then, we have added procedures to send and reply to liaison statements
from stand-alone Rapporteur group meeting and, if necessary, entirely by
email correspondence in the case where the due date is prior to the next
scheduled meeting of any kind. SG and WP chairman approval is obtained via
email. In these cases, we still enter the liaison statements that were
dealt with between SG meetings into the meeting record for the next full
SG meeting so that permanent records are kept of the responses.

IETF differs in several respects. The most important is that IETF generally
makes decisions via email and never in a physical meeting. With ITU-T, almost
all decisions are made in physical meetings - a lot of prepatory work and
consensus building gets done via email correspondence, but the final decision
generally waits for the meeting. It is the exception when we need to "fast
track" a decision even as minor as sending a liaison statement by doing approvals
via email correspondence.

As we look at how IETF should implement a liaison statement process, we
clearly need something electronic (web or email based). We don't want to
copy what ITU-T does, as it doesn't fit the culture to, for example,
put the decision making into the physical meetings.

In an earlier private draft, I had outlined an entirely manual email/web
procedure building off what the secretariat currently does with
statements@ietf.org. I thought this was something we could get started
with immediately (no software development required), and we could
make adjustments to it and automate it gradually as we gained
experience.

You see Fred's influence in the current automated proposal: He didn't
feel like automation was that hard, he didn't want to give the secretariat
any more work, and he felt that we had a lot of the required pieces
already. BTW, there is already a prototype if you haven't seen it yet.
Regards,
Steve