Network Working Group M. Barnes Internet-Draft Polycom Intended status: Informational A. Doria Expires: January 13, 2011 Lulea University of Technology H. Alvestrand Google B. Carpenter University of Auckland July 12, 2010 General Area Review Team (GenART) Experiences draft-doria-genart-experience-03 Abstract The General Area Review team has been doing Reviews of Internet Drafts since 2004. This draft discusses the experience and the lessons learned over the past 6+ years of this process. The review team initially reviewed the drafts before each of the IESG telechats. Beginning in late 2005, review team members have been assigned to review documents during IETF Last Call, unless no IETF Last Call is necessary for the document. The same reviewer then reviews any updates when the document is placed on an IESG telechat agenda. Status of this Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." This Internet-Draft will expire on January 13, 2011. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2010 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Barnes, et al. Expires January 13, 2011 [Page 1] Internet-Draft GenART July 2010 Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2. Who are the GenART review team members? . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3. Goals of GenART . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 4. GenART Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 4.1. IETF LC Review Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 4.2. IESG Telechat Review Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 4.3. Form of Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 4.4. GenART Process Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 5. Secretarial Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 5.1. Maintaining review spreadsheet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 5.2. Last Call Assignment procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 5.3. Telechat Assignment procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 5.4. Capturing reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 6. Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 7. Impressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 7.1. Reviewers' Impressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 7.2. General Area Directors' Impressions . . . . . . . . . . . 15 7.3. GenART Secretaries' Impressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 8. Needed Improvements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 9. Applicability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 10. Security considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 11. IANA considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 12. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 13. Changes since Last Version . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 14. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Barnes, et al. Expires January 13, 2011 [Page 2] Internet-Draft GenART July 2010 1. Introduction The General Area Review team was created personally by the General Area Director in 2004. The review team has been retained by subsequent General Area Directors. It has no official role in the IETF standards process, except as a set of individuals entitled, like everyone, to comment on Internet-Drafts. Its Secretary, and the team of volunteer reviewers, serve at the invitation of the General AD. Discussion of this document is intended to take place on the IETF mailing list in the absence of a better home. In addition, comments may be specifically sent to the gen-art mailing list: . 2. Who are the GenART review team members? The reviewers are typically individuals that have a fair amount of experience within various IETF Working Groups (WGs), have authored WG drafts and RFCs, and are often considered to be subject matter experts (SMEs) in their particular areas of work. The current review team is comprised of such technical experts including several WG chairs and past and current IAB members. Several past and current ADs have served as reviewers. Two past General ADs have also served as reviewers, with one currently serving. Members of the review team sometimes excuse themselves from the team for various reasons, typically due to "day" job demands. However, they often rejoin (for periods of time) as their schedules allow. Also, some reviewers remain on the team, while their review workload is decreased by assigning them just one document (at Last Call time) to review each month. Section 12 provides a list of currently active reviewers, along with those who have served on the review team in the past. 3. Goals of GenART The original and continuing goal of the GenART team was, and is, to offload some of the burden from the General Area AD of IESG reviews. The load for the bi-weekly IESG reviews is often quite large; occasionally there are more than 20 drafts scheduled for discussion in a single telechat. Thus, ADs also have less than a week's notice for many of the documents on the telechat agenda. GenART was based on a model that had proved productive in the OPS Directorate: Quick review close to telechat time, to advise the AD on issues that remain serious. By having a trusted group of reviewers Barnes, et al. Expires January 13, 2011 [Page 3] Internet-Draft GenART July 2010 read and evaluate the drafts, the General Area AD would be able to concentrate on those drafts where there was a concern expressed by the reviewer. The reviewers are expected to provide feedback based on a whole set of criteria including the criteria summarized in Section 4.3. The overall objective is to ensure that the documents are well structured, can be easily understood, at least at a high level, and provides a reasonable basis for implementation (for standard's track documents). While other area (and WG) directorates/review teams existed prior to GenART and more have been established since GenART, the roles of each are fairly distinct. Thus, there is little overlap between the goals and review criteria for the various review teams. It is also very valuable for these other review teams to operate independently. For example, when both GenART reviews and sec-dir reviews raise the same sorts of concerns, it's a clear red flag that the document needs more work before progressing. In addition, due to the typical thoroughness (and objectiveness) of the various review teams' reviews, ADs/PROTO shepherds are often able to work with the editors/WG (and vice versa depending upon area and WG structure) to improve the overall quality of the final document. Statistics from the GenART reviews over the past 6 + years show a trend of increased quality and readiness for progression of documents by the time they are placed on the telechat agenda. Additional statistics are discussed in Section 6. 4. GenART Reviews 4.1. IETF LC Review Process While the original process was meant only for reviews just before the IESG telechat, it was decided to include IETF Last Call reviews in early 2005. This initially seemed to be an overloading of the process and presented some initial difficulties. However, over time it has proven to be quite effective. Assigning the documents at IETF LC time typically gives a reviewer more time to review a document. And, in some cases, the IETF LC version is the one to appear on the telechat. Thus, by the time documents are added to the telechat agenda, a majority (typically at least 70%) have already been reviewed. For those documents that have been up-versioned, the amount of time dedicated to re-review depends upon the review summary for the IETF LC review. The assignments at IETF LC time evolved to minimize the gap between LC announcements and assignment time, with the secretary doing LC assignments every Thursday night. This typically allows the reviewer Barnes, et al. Expires January 13, 2011 [Page 4] Internet-Draft GenART July 2010 at least one week and sometimes two to three weeks to complete the review. The reviews are obviously most helpful when done on or before the end of IETF LC. The Last Call assignments are done on a fairly strict round robin basis to ensure a fair workload amongst all the reviewers. Reviewers that are unavailable (vacations, etc.) during the review period timeframe obviously are excluded from that round of assignments, but remain in the same queue position for the next round. The order is occasionally modified to avoid assigning an editor/author or WG chair their own documents. A reviewer may also NACK an assignment if they feel they may have some bias (although corporate affiliations are not considered to be sources of bias) or they don't feel they can review the document in a timely manner. The assignment process is completely manual, although a spreadsheet, maintained using Open Office, tremendously facilitates the process. The details are described in Section 5. Ideally, this process could be automated. However, manual intervention would still be required to maintain the appropriate available reviewer list (unless reviewers took on the task of maintaining their data in some sort of database). Further details on the tools necessary to automate the entire process are provided in Section 8. 4.2. IESG Telechat Review Process The process for reviewing documents when they appear on the IESG agenda: o The "nearly final" IESG meeting agenda generally appears on Thursday night, less than one week before the IESG telechat. The GenART secretary uses this as the input for the assignment process. o For documents reviewed at IETF Last Call, a new review is only asked for if the document is revised. In this case the reviewer, typically the person who did the Last Call review, only needs to check that any open issues were resolved. Often the draft will not have changed between IETF LC and the IESG telechat review. Section 4.4 provides the step by step telechat review assignment process, with specific details on the maintenance of the review assignment data, maintained in spreadsheets detailed in section Section 5. 4.3. Form of Review Rather than invent new guidelines, the GenART requirements for the form of a review stole liberally from draft-carpenter-solutions-sirs-01, making adaptations for the special Barnes, et al. Expires January 13, 2011 [Page 5] Internet-Draft GenART July 2010 "late, quick review" case and the nature of the General Area's concerns. Each review must start with a summary statement chosen from or adapted from the following list: o This draft is ready for publication as a [type] RFC, where [type] is Informational, Experimental, etc. (In some cases, the review might recommend publication as a different [type] than requested by the author.) o This draft is basically ready for publication, but has nits that should be fixed before publication. o This draft is on the right track but has open issues, described in the review. o This draft has serious issues, described in the review, and needs to be rethought. o This draft has very fundamental issues, described in the review, and further work is not recommended. o Unfortunately, I don't have the expertise to review this draft. The length of a review can vary greatly according to circumstances, and it is considered acceptable for purely editorial comments to be sent privately if it's obvious that the document needs substantial revision. All substantive comments, however, must be included in the public review. Wherever possible, comments should be written as suggestions for improvement rather than as simple criticism. Explicit references to prior work and prior IETF discussion should be given whenever possible. Reviewers are asked to review for all kinds of problems, from basic architectural or security issues, Internet-wide impact, technical nits, problems of form and format (such as IANA Considerations or incorrect references), and editorial issues. Since these reviews are on documents that are supposed to be finished, the review should consider "no issue too small" - but should cover the whole range from the general architectural level to the editorial level. All reviews should apply generally agreed IETF criteria, such as: o [RFC1958]: The Architectural Principles of the Internet o [RFC3426]: General Architectural and Policy Considerations o [RFC3439]: Some Internet Architectural Guidelines and Philosophy o ID-Checklist: The "ID checklist" document maintained by the IESG o [I-D.rfc-editor-rfc2223bis]: Instructions to RFC Authors o [RFC5226]: BCP 26 - Guidelines for Writing an IANA Considerations Section in RFCs Barnes, et al. Expires January 13, 2011 [Page 6] Internet-Draft GenART July 2010 o [RFC3552]: Guidelines for Writing RFC Text on Security Considerations o As well as any other applicable architectural or procedural documents. It is considered important that reviews give precise references to such criteria when relevant to a comment. Of special interest to the GEN area, because it's no other area's special interest is: o Clear description of why the document or protocol is useful to the Internet. o Adherence to IETF formalities such as capitalized "must", "should", etc. in normative statements, per the ID-Checklist. o Useful and reasonable IANA considerations. Ensure that all necessary registries are defined/referenced and ensure definition and compliance with IANA assignment criteria. o Correct dependencies for normative references. o That it's written in reasonably clear English. o Checking the updates/obsoletes information. o Running idnits and checking the output. o Checking that things imported by reference especially from other RFCs make sense (notably definitions of terms, security considerations, lists of criteria)and ensure they are used as intended by the refeenced document. o Examples (eg FQDNs, telephone numbers, IP addresses) are taken from the right spaces. 4.4. GenART Process Overview The following provides a general overview of the Gen-ART process along with some basic rules associated with assignments. The very precise details of the secretary's process are provided in Section 5. o The availability of reviewers and the order of assignments for the next round of Last Call document assignments is updated weekly and is available on the directory where all the assignments and reviews are cached. o At telechat assignment time, all previously reviewed drafts are assigned to the reviewer who reviewed them previously, assuming that reviewer is available. Otherwise, these documents are assigned to a new person in the process described below. o In the case of multiple drafts grouped as a single ballot, those are typically divided among several reviewers unless they're very small (i.e., less than 20 pages). o The secretary attempts to avoid assigning documents that might conflict with other IETF roles such as WG chairs, other directorates, etc. However, in the cases where the secretary doesn't note the conflict, the reviewer should notify the Barnes, et al. Expires January 13, 2011 [Page 7] Internet-Draft GenART July 2010 secretary and gen-art mailing list so another reviewer may be assigned. o It should be emphasized that assignment is never made according to a reviewer's technical specialty. Even though it happens, when, for example, routing drafts fall on routing experts or MIBs fall on MIB doctors, it is coincidental. To the reviewer, the choice looks random. o There is an attempt to evenly distribute documents amongst reviewers at LC time by using a round robin process, starting from where the previous week's assignments stopped. o Typically, there is no attempt made to actually equalize the load as the length and complexity of the drafts is not taken into account in this process. (Thus, a reviewer could end up with a couple of hundred-page documents, but this is statistically rare.) However, in the case of a reviewer that might receive more than one new LC document at one time, the secretary does try to ensure that both are not large documents. o Once the assignments are made, the web pages that list the reviews and the assignments are posted. Since the telechat agenda is not published until the end of the day on the Thursdays prior to the telechats (i.e., one week prior to), the secretary needs to complete the assignments on that Thursday evening. This often requires working later in the evening and also requires an Internet connection even when traveling. o If the reviewers notice any problems or conflict of interest, a bargaining process, shifting documents from one reviewer to another, takes place. The secretary updates the assignment files with any new assignments. o Once the review has been completed the reviewer sends the review to the GenART list, ideally using the template provided in the review assignment emails. Typically, reviews are also sent to authors, ADs and WG chairs/Proto Shepherds. The only case where this might not be done is when there are no issues found for a re- review and none had been found on an initial review. Sending the review to the authors, ADs and/or WG chairs/Proto Shepherds was originally voluntary but is now considered standard practice. Reviewers may also send the reviews to the IETF discussion list, but that is entirely at the discretion of the reviewer, in which case the author must be copied on the review to ensure they see any follow-up discussion. Reviewers may also send the comments to the WG, however, this typically causes the review to end up in the moderation queue, as most reviewers do not want to subscribe to the WG lists for the documents they review. Thus, it is expected that the original recipients (authors, WG chairs/PROTO or AD) may forward the review to the WG mailing list if they believe it is necessary. In the past, sending these reviews resulted in confusion among the authors, who may not have been expecting a GenART review and may not be familiar with GenART. Thus, Barnes, et al. Expires January 13, 2011 [Page 8] Internet-Draft GenART July 2010 reviewers are reminded to pre-pend the description of GenART and the purpose of the review. This information is part of the standard template provided in the review assignment emails. o The secretary gathers the reviews, sometimes edits them for format, records the review in the spreadsheet on the web pages, including the synopsis. This is typically done on Thursday. This is one aspect of the process that can be easily delegated such that one volunteer uploads all the reviews and then the secretary need only update the fields in the spreadsheet. If the reviewer has not provided a synopsis ("Summary" field in the template), the secretary makes a best guess based on the review details. Note that in most cases the reviewers do include a synopsis. o Ideally the reviews should be posted to the gen-art mailing list by COB Tuesday (approximately 8 PM EST). This is necessary to allow the General Area director time to consider the reviews prior to the telechat. If the reviews are received after Tuesday the review may not be read by the AD before the IESG telechat. Due to time constraints, the spreadsheets containing review summaries/ assignments are only updated on Thursday evenings when the new LC assigns and upcoming telechat assignments are done. Ideally, the reviews would get uploaded on the Tuesdays prior to the telechat along with the updated spreadsheets. o If the AD concludes that the concerns raised by the reviewer warrant placing a DISCUSS comment on the document, the AD will do so, and the DISCUSS must be resolved before the document advances. Usually, the reviewer will be involved in the resolution process, but the responsibility for the DISCUSS rests with the AD. o 5. Secretarial Process This section summarizes the details of managing the review materials, including the spreadsheet used to track all reviews and the HTML files containing the review assignments. 5.1. Maintaining review spreadsheet An Open Office spreadsheet is used to enter all the documents at the time of assignment and to capture all the reviews. For IETF LC assignments, the assignments are completed before adding the documents to the spreadsheet as described in Section 5.2. For telechat assignments documents are obviously only added in the cases where there is no previous LC assignment. For the other documents, the appropriate fields are updated as described in Section 5.3 All the reviews can be accessed from the spreadsheet via hyperlinks from specific fields as summarized below. The following information Barnes, et al. Expires January 13, 2011 [Page 9] Internet-Draft GenART July 2010 is maintained in the spreadsheet (in the order listed): 1. "Chat/LC Date": indicates either the date on which the LC review is due or the date of the telechat. 2. "Document": Filename for the text document. This field also includes a hyperlink to the IETF I-D tracker. 3. "Assigned": Name of the reviewer assigned to that document. 4. "Category": This field contains one of the following self explanatory values: "PROTO - WG", "PROTO - Ind/AD", "Doc - WG", "Doc - Ind/AD", or "IETF LC". Note that GenART does not review documents submitted directly to the RFC editor. The "IETF LC" field is entered obviously for all documents at LC time. It is changed to one of the other appropriate fields, based on the information in the telechat agenda 5. "Previous Review": This includes a link to any previous reviews. For example, when a doc appears on a telechat agenda, if an IETF LC review was done, this field is updated to "IETF-LC" and it has a hyperlink to the LC review. The field is set to "New" when a document is first assigned/added to the spreadsheet. In the case of returns, this field has a value of "Return" or "Return/ IETF-LC" for documents for which there is an LC review. It should be noted that since GenART started doing reviews at LC time, there seem to be far fewer returns on the agenda. 6. "Current Review Summary": When the field contains text, it includes a link to the most recent review - typically IETF LC or telechat. Occasionally, a reviewer will re-review a document prior to its telechat assignment, in which case it is added to the spreadsheet but the date does not change to maintain consistency in the date field, since the reviews themselves contain the review date. The following summarizes the steps to add a new document to the spreadsheet: 1. In order to optimize steps, blank rows are first inserted for the number of new documents to be added. 2. To minimize data entry, a row with default fields (including the links for the hyperlinks) is kept at the end of the file. There is a separate default row for IETF LC versus Telechat assignments. This row is copied into each of the new blank rows. The dates are then entered (this allows the double checking that all documents are accounted for from the review assignments, especially LC). 3. The document name is then copied to the name field as well as being appended to the hyperlink for the "Review Summary" field. The hyperlink is included as part of the default row. This minimizes the steps in enter the reviews in the spreadsheet. Barnes, et al. Expires January 13, 2011 [Page 10] Internet-Draft GenART July 2010 4. The data is also sorted by "Chat/LC Date", "Assigned" and "Document". The file is then saved and closed. 5. The file is then reopened and saved as HTML. 6. The file is opened a second time and sorted by "Assigned", "Chat/LC Date" and "Document" to provide the document reviewers an easy way to find any outstanding assignments. 5.2. Last Call Assignment procedure The secretary can either cache the Last Call assignments as they are announced or just check the IETF announcement mailing list archives. The current secretary does both, double-checking the archives to ensure no reviews were missed. The assignments are done on Thursday evening, along with any telechat assignments. This optimizes the process in terms of batch changes to files. The assignments are listed in an HTML file. The following are the steps in creating that file: 1. The order of assignment is actually created the week before, with the details below. Thus, before starting the new assignments the current file is saved for editing for the following week. The current filenaming convention is "reviewersyymmdd-lc.html" (e.g., for July 8th, 2010, the file reviewers100708-lc.html was created and the file for the following week is named reviewers100715- lc.html). 2. Since the file is already prepared with the appropriate ordering of reviewers, the assignments are done in the order of due dates. The LC announcement text (starting with the document name) is copied into the assignment file for each of the new LC documents. 3. The paragraph as to the "Due Date" is shortened with the following text: "IETF LC ends on:", keeping the date. 4. Once the assignment file is complete, the new documents are added to the spreadsheet as described in above. 5. The assignment file for the next week is then updated to reflect the next reviewer in the round robin process, by simply cutting and pasting the names in the list in a block and removing any "one doc per month" reviewers (annotated with an "*") that have already received their monthly assignment. If the next round of assignments occurs at the beginning of a new month, the "one doc per month" reviewers are added back into the list (in the normal "by first name alphabetical order"). 6. The assignment files and updated spreadsheets are then cached on the GenART server. 7. An email providing a link to the assignment file, along with the updated spreadsheets is sent to the gen-art mailing list. This email has a standard form, such that the reviewers can simply cut and paste the template to include the GenART context statement Barnes, et al. Expires January 13, 2011 [Page 11] Internet-Draft GenART July 2010 and link to FAQ. 5.3. Telechat Assignment procedure Since LC assignments are now the starting point for GenART document reviews, the telechat assignments are generally straightforward as the majority of the documents are already in the spreadsheet. The following details the steps: 1. The telechat agenda is typically available around 6PM PDT. In order to create the assignment HTML file, the agenda is created from the email announcing the upcoming telechat agenda. The filename has the following format, with the date corresponding to the telechat date (versus the data of assignment as is the case for last call assignments): "reviewersyymmdd".html. 2. Rows are added to the agenda for the reviewer's name. 3. The reviewers names are then added to the weekly assignment file. 4. As each reviewer is added to the assignment file, the review spreadsheet is updated as follows: * "Chat/LC Date" is changed to the telechat date. * The link to the LC review, if available, is copied to past as the link for the "Previous Review" column. * If the version for the telechat is different, the link in the "Current Review" column is updated, so that it will point to the new review when available (this saves a step because the updating of file version is done in the same step AFTER the link is copied. The "text" for the "Current Review" is cleared (i.e., set to the default of underscore, "_". * If the version number is different, the change is also made to the "Document" field. Note, this is the least critical step because the link in that field points to the tracker, so the right version should always be pulled. 5. In the case of a document that did not go through IETF LC, a reviewer is assigned using the order in the file to be used for Last Call assignments for the next week. 6. Once the reviewer(s) have been determined, the LC assignment file for the next week is updated. 7. Any new documents are then added to the spreadsheet (and the updates saved) per the steps as described in Section 5.1. 8. The assignment files and updated spreadsheets are then cached on the server used for GenART; currently in a "temporary" directory on www.softarmor.com, hosted by Dean Willis. Ideally, these files would be stored on an IETF hosted server and links to reviews would be available in the ID tracker. 9. An email providing a link to the assignment file, along with the updated spreadsheets is sent to the gen-art mailing list. This email has a standard form, such that the reviewers can simply cut and paste the template to include the GenART context statement Barnes, et al. Expires January 13, 2011 [Page 12] Internet-Draft GenART July 2010 and link to FAQ. 5.4. Capturing reviews As noted in Section 4.4 the spreadsheet is typically updated with the review summaries on Thursday evenings just prior to entering the data for that week's LC and any Telechat assignments. The following summarizes the steps to capture the reviews: 1. Currently, a volunteers is assisting the secretary in caching the email reviews as they arrive. 2. In the cases where the review is included inline in the body of the email, the review is cut and pasted into a text file and saved with the reviewers last name appended to the filename - e.g., draft-ietf-xyz-00-smith.txt . 3. In the case where the review is included as an attachment to the email, the file can be directly saved and uploaded. 4. The volunteer uploads the reviews by around 5pm CST on Thursdays, thus they are available to the secretary at the time that weeks assignments are done. This sequence is necessary to ensure the information for documents on the upcoming telechat is up-to-date. 5. The review summary is entered into the text portion for the "Current Summary" field. Noting that the hyperlink to the review (added at assignment time) will automatically work when the file is uploaded. 6. Once all the reviews have been entered and the spreadsheets formatted, the review spreadsheet is saved and files uploaded per the last three steps in Section 5.1. 6. Results Over the past 6+ years, the GenART has provided reviewing services to 3 ADs and has done around two thousand publicly available reviews. The reviews have been executed with a team of around a dozen full- time reviewers and other reviewers receiving one document assignment each month. There are currently 9 reviewers in the latter category. The full-time reviewers receive 2-3 assignments each month. In terms of improving quality, the number of documents that are now ready at the time of the telechat since the reviews are now initiated at LC time has increased. Based on the data from 2007, there were over 250 documents that were assigned at LC time that went through IESG review. Of those 250 documents, 80% of the LC reviews were completed (205 documents). Of the completed reviews about 75% (144 documents) were "Ready" at the time of the telechat. Of those 144 documents, roughly 1/4 had been deemed "Ready" (with no nits) at LC time (based on a sample of 50 reviews). For the documents that were not reviewed at LC time, only about 1/4 of those were deemed "Ready" when they Barnes, et al. Expires January 13, 2011 [Page 13] Internet-Draft GenART July 2010 were reviewed for the telechat. So, doing the gen-art reviews at Last Call time does seem to improve the quality of the documents for the telechat. 7. Impressions This section is divided into 3 subsections, the impressions as gathered from the GenART review team, the impressions of the ADs for whom they worked, and the impressions of the secretaries of Gen-ART. 7.1. Reviewers' Impressions The following list of comments are excerpted and edited from comments sent in by the reviewers of GenART in response to the request: "We'd like to ask you each to write a few lines about your personal experience and lessons learned as a GenART reviewer." o We really do find problems, but we don't find problems with most documents. o Comments seem to be in three areas: editorial/grammar, editorial/ what-the-heck-does-this-mean, and actual problems. I'm seeing fewer reviews in the first category, which is a good thing. o It is becoming rarer that we hear back "these guys have suffered enough, I'm voting no objection" (I'm remembering an LDAP document that had been around so long it had 2119 referenced AS A DRAFT - some people suffered a lot). o The direct assignment of reviews is necessary and effective. It does not matter much as far as I can tell what scheme is used to actually do the assignment. o Folks are very open to the reviews that come out of GenART. This somewhat surprised me because I have seen resistance to outside reviews in other cases. o The improvements that have come about (for example one of my latest, the sipping conference draft - whatever the outcome) have made a big difference to the comprehensibility and usability of the documents - and provide a useful incentive to keep going. o Some form of review like this is desperately needed. While most of the stuff we see is good, every once in a while really bad errors have made their way all the way to IESG vote. o Reading this stuff is interesting. I like having a reason to read a wide range of materials. o I am more than convinced that this can be and is a valuable process. It is IMO a pity that SIRS and so on did not take off, because this late stage reviewing is a poor substitute for doing the same thing at a much earlier stage. Very few of the drafts that have come past my screen are truly fully ready for IESG Barnes, et al. Expires January 13, 2011 [Page 14] Internet-Draft GenART July 2010 review. It is actually a joy to find the occasional nugget that is both well written and is a proper technical job, such that the review really can say 'This is ready'. o I have certainly found the process intellectually stimulating! It encourages me to take a wider interest in what is going on in the IETF, but consumes a fair bit of time to do a proper job, and requires a very wide knowledge to be able to properly catch the cross-area implications: I hope (believe!) that this is something that one gets better at with experience and doing a few of these reviews. o There are probably a very limited pool of people who have both the time and the inclination to keep on doing these reviews. It does require a fair bit of dedication. o It is difficult to avoid correcting the English, even if that is not really the point: Often really bad English (whether as a result of non-mother tongue authors with limited grasp or mother tongue authors using informal language) obscures/corrupts what is being said or just makes it impossible to read. o Mostly authors welcome the comments: I think most of them understand the concept of 'ego-free reviewing' and we have generally been constructive rather than destructive. o Part of the job of GenART is to think the unthinkable from another point of view, to challenge (apparently undocumented) assumptions and apply experience from other fields. 7.2. General Area Directors' Impressions It should be noted that these impressions are from multiple General Area Directors' thus the "I"s are not necessarily associated with a specific AD. It's essential. The reviewing load for the IESG DOES NOT SCALE. On a single fortnight example, the IESG had 21 drafts on the agenda. It is just impossible, and no wonder we sometimes miss serious issues. So I think a distributed review team with o(30) trusted reviewers needs to be institutionalized. I suspect that will need to be formalized in a BCP sooner or later - with their reviews having a formal position in the standards process, and the expectation that the whole IESG truly reviews all documents being relaxed. We've learned that polite, well reasoned, constructive reviews are very positively received by authors and WGs. Dismissive reviews are counter-productive. And reviews sent in private eventually show up in public, so it's better to go public at the start. Barnes, et al. Expires January 13, 2011 [Page 15] Internet-Draft GenART July 2010 Normally, LC reviews are available in good time for the draft to be revised before reaching the IESG agenda. It is important that this happens, except for an emergency situation where the responsible AD has good reason to place the draft on the agenda immediately. In that case it would be preferable for the AD to inform the GenART team, so that the review can be expedited. The other problem is a big detail - between late Thursday or early Friday when the secretary sends out the assignments, and Wednesday when the General Area AD likes to start filling in ballots based on the reviews received by COB on Tuesday, there are only three work days (plus possible volunteer time over the weekend). Now even with only one document to review, that may be a real challenge. Sometimes, a lucky reviewer will get 130 pages (e.g. draft-ietf-nntpext-base-27). That doesn't compute. There are some mechanical issues. The process followed is far too manual. Everything needs to be robotic except for the judgment calls about which reviewer gets which draft. Similarly, the reviewer should be able to just paste the review into a web form, click, and it's sent off to everyone appropriate and posted to the review site. 7.3. GenART Secretaries' Impressions Serving as the secretary of GenART is a worthwhile experience. From a personal point of view, it gives the secretary an easy way to track all of the work going through the IESG review process and see how the work flowed through that process. Also, by reviewing and doing light editing on all of the reviews in order to create some degree of uniformity of presentation and to create the one line abstracts that go on the review web page, the secretary has an opportunity to really get a survey of the work being approved by the IETF. The nature of these reviews is informal, and originally the reviews were only intended for the General Area AD, though they were made public. During 2004 there was little if any interaction between authors and reviewers. There was some discussion during 2004 about trying to expand the role of GenART to a more formal, early review model, i.e to evolve it into a form of SIRS. The original GenART secretary was against such a transformation because she felt it would risk something that worked. She believed that the risk was inherent in formalizing the reviews and in adding mechanisms for standardizing the review mechanisms that would resort from formalization. Another concern involves the interaction between reviewers and authors. As discussed above, it has become the practice to send reviews to the authors with an explanation about the nature of GenART reviews. While it is clear that this has resulted in improved RFCs, it has also resulted in increased work load for the reviewers. Barnes, et al. Expires January 13, 2011 [Page 16] Internet-Draft GenART July 2010 The secretary thinks that GenART as an experiment that works well, but the secretary believes it is fragile. The secretary is often concerned about overburdening reviewers, and feels it is her responsibility to keep them from burning out. Adding additional reviewers to the review team would help to alleviate this concern. In terms of the process, adding additional reviewers has minimal impact. 8. Needed Improvements The current size of the review team introduces a fairly heavy workload for the individual reviewers that are not on the "one doc per month" assignment cycle. Additional reviewers would be really helpful to alleviate this workload. It is also important to note that having additional reviewers adds minimal workload to the secretary's process, thus the only blocking point is finding the right folks that are interested in this type of volunteer role. As noted in Section 7.2, 30 would be a good size for the review team. This would cut the workload for an individual reviewer in half (given the current model of 9 reviewers on the "one doc per month" assignment cycle). Obviously, automation of the process would be a good thing. However, the current secretary is not highly motivated to transition to a more automated approach until a significant part of the process is automated. In more recent consideration of this situation, it likely would be best to first automate the process of entering the reviews, as that benefits the review team as a whole. This automation should allow the reviewers to enter the reviews via a web interface that would automatically generate the appropriate emails - quite similar to how the draft "Upload" tool currently works. Also, given consistent naming conventions for the review forms, this step would automate some of the process for the secretary, as the reviews would automatically appear via the Spreadsheet hyperlinks, although there would still be a need to manually enter the summary. But, this would eliminate the need to edit/normalize and upload files. And, hopefully, eliminate the problem encountered with unflowed text in emails and getting the review properly formatted using some text editors. Section 5 was written to facilitate the process of determining tools requirements, by providing the very detailed steps currently applied to the process. As noted above, automating the upload of the reviews could be a good first step. This is somewhat starting at the end of the process. However, it seems that by automating in this direction, we may have optimal results, since one of the earliest steps in the process is the task of assiging reviewers it likely needs the most Barnes, et al. Expires January 13, 2011 [Page 17] Internet-Draft GenART July 2010 manual intervention, even with tools available. The current security directorate (sec-dir) secretary does use some tools for assignments and generating assignment emails. These tools could be considered for use by the GenART secretary. Since the sec- dir reviews are not cached and the information maintained for those reviews is less detailed, there would be no reusability of that aspect. However, if the GenART spreadsheet can be automatically populated (with assignments and completed reviews), the sec-dir may be able to make use of that same tool. A third improvement would be to move the review repository to an IETF hosted server. This would provide us more reliability in terms of having a back-up server and is required when we automate the process. Thus, we should make this step a priority and the first step prior to any automation. 9. Applicability As implemented today, the process has no formal role in the IETF standards process. But as trust in the review team has built, and as the team itself has learned to deliver reviews that are generally well received, they have had a significant impact on document quality and on timeliness. Rather than becoming a roadblock, they have (in general) allowed the General AD to feel more confident in reaching decisions and be more precise in resolving issues. Since reviews now typically appear during IETF Last Call, the reviews like the sec-dir reviews are now generally expected. So, the role of the team has evolved to be more formal than in the past (i.e., when this document was first published in 2005). However, the handling of the reviews remain entirely within the scope of the ADs, PROTO shepherds, WG and authors as they deem appropriate. 10. Security considerations Since this is an informational document about an open process, the security considerations are specific to the process and users involved in the process. The primary concern would be to limit the people that have access to the GenART data/files to ensure that the integrity of the data is maintained. Also, once the data is moved to the IETF servers, the normal IETF processes should ensure that only authorized individuals can access the data. For example, each GenART reviewer should have a unique user name/password, just as folks do to access any other IETF maintained data and/or tools, as appropriate. Barnes, et al. Expires January 13, 2011 [Page 18] Internet-Draft GenART July 2010 11. IANA considerations As this is an informational document about an IETF process, there are no IANA considerations. 12. Acknowledgments Initial comments were received from the members of the GenART team and the experiences discussed in this document were derived from their hard work over the last 6+: We thank the past reviewers of the GenART team: Mark Allman Harald Alvestrand (originator of GenART) Ron Bonica Gonzalo Camarillo Sharon Chisholm Lakshminath Dondeti Avri Doria (past secretary) Pasi Eronen Eric Gray John Loughney Lucy Lynch Michael Patton Robert Sparks Tom Taylor Sean Turner Christian Vogt Suzannne Woolf As well as the current team of reviewers/secretary: Mary Barnes (secretary), Richard Barnes* David Black* Scott Brim*(2) Ben Campbell Brian Carpenter (past GEN AD) Elwyn Davies* Spencer Dawkins* Francis Dupont Roni Even Miguel-Angel Garcia Dorothy Gellert Vijay Gurbani (assisting secretary to upload reviews) Wassim Haddad Joel Halpern Avashalom Houri Glenn Kowack Suresh Krishnan Peter McCann Enrico Marocco James Polk* Stefan Santesson* 13. Changes since Last Version Changes between 02 and 03: 1. Updated to reflect current practices such as another volunteer uploading the reviews, the spreadsheet only being updated on Thursdays and the movement of the reviews to another server. 2. Updated step by step details on the secretary's process to facilitate tools requirements. 3. Updated lists of reviewers. 4. Added the documents which provide the baseline for reviews to the informational reference section. Changes between 01 to 02: 1. Updated to reflect current practices such as assignment at Last Call time being the norm, standard template for reviews/emails, new members of team, comments from current secretary, General Area AD and review team members. 2. Removed previous comments in the "Impressions" section that are no longer germane such as problems with no standard boilerplate, problems with LC reviews, etc. Barnes, et al. Expires January 13, 2011 [Page 19] Internet-Draft GenART July 2010 3. Added step by step details on the secretary's process to facilitate tools requirements. 4. Added the documents which provide the baseline for reviews to the informal reference section. 14. Informative References [RFC1958] Carpenter, B., "Architectural Principles of the Internet", RFC 1958, June 1996. [RFC3426] Floyd, S., "General Architectural and Policy Considerations", RFC 3426, November 2002. [RFC3439] Bush, R. and D. Meyer, "Some Internet Architectural Guidelines and Philosophy", RFC 3439, December 2002. [I-D.rfc-editor-rfc2223bis] Reynolds, J. and R. Braden, "Instructions to Request for Comments (RFC) Authors", draft-rfc-editor-rfc2223bis-08 (work in progress), July 2004. [RFC5226] Narten, T. and H. Alvestrand, "Guidelines for Writing an IANA Considerations Section in RFCs", BCP 26, RFC 5226, May 2008. [RFC3552] Rescorla, E. and B. Korver, "Guidelines for Writing RFC Text on Security Considerations", BCP 72, RFC 3552, July 2003. Authors' Addresses Mary Barnes Polycom TX US Email: mary.ietf.barnes@gmail.com Barnes, et al. Expires January 13, 2011 [Page 20] Internet-Draft GenART July 2010 Avri Doria Lulea University of Technology Arbetsvetenskap Lulea SE-97187 Email: avri@acm.org Harald Alvestrand Google Beddingen 10 Trondheim 7014 NO Email: harald@alvestrand.no Brian E Carpenter University of Auckland PB 92019 Auckland, 1142 New Zealand Phone: Email: brian.e.carpenter@gmail.com Barnes, et al. Expires January 13, 2011 [Page 21]