A concept resurrected(?) - WG secretary?

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no>]

The IESG was discussing the state of minutes from WG meetings last week.

Generally, there are problems with both quality and timeliness of meeting 
minutes - they are often late to the secretariat, or do not arrive at all; 
their format varies widely, and it can be very hard from some of the 
minutes to identify the decisions the WG thought that it reached at the 
meeting.

Since this forms part of the record of the standards process, which is 
important in order to document that we have followed our open process, this 
is not great.

We then remembered the following passage from RFC 2418 (WG guidelines):

6.2. WG Secretary

  Taking minutes and editing working group documents often is performed
  by a specifically-designated participant or set of participants.  In
  this role, the Secretary's job is to record WG decisions, rather than
  to perform basic specification.

We've mostly not done this in later years, most chairs instead doing the 
"does anyone want to volunteer to take minutes" style.
However, it might be a worthwhile thing to do.

I checked with the secretariat - it's a relatively trivial job to add the 
role of "WG Secretary" to IETF WG charters, so that there's both public 
knowledge of who has the post and some "payback" for it - and having the 
people be formally identified and committed would also allow us to do 
things like targeting them for information, or engaging them in discussion, 
on how this role needs to be performed.
One could also imagine this role subsuming the role of "WG facilitator", 
and being also a natural first choice for things like issue tracking.

But the obvious overhead is that the WG chairs have to identify and recruit 
people to fill these positions.

What do the WG chairs think? Is anyone doing this at present? Is it worth 
trying?

                     Harald