<div dir="ltr">Hi Toke,<div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 8:31 AM, Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:toke@toke.dk" target="_blank">toke@toke.dk</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><span class="">Juliusz Chroboczek <<a href="mailto:jch@pps.univ-paris-diderot.fr">jch@pps.univ-paris-diderot.fr</a>> writes:<br>
<br>
> My feeling right now -- unless we f*ck up really badly, this is going to<br>
> be a productive and fun working group.<br>
<br>
</span>I agree. One thing that I would like to emphasise from the meeting was<br>
the direction Juliusz set out for the working group (the "traditions"<br>
part of his talk, for those looking it up in the slides/video). I<br>
believe this is especially important for bridging the existing Babel<br>
open source community to the IETF process and working group.<br>
<br>
The two most important points in this were "work happens on the mailing<br>
list" and "running code required". While it was later clarified that<br>
there is no formal IETF rules imposing any of these on the working<br>
group, I believe they are fundamental for the kind of work we want to do<br>
here. So I will heartily endorse these principles and hope that we can<br>
build a working group tradition that builds upon them.</blockquote><div><br></div><div>I agree that it was useful to have an open discussion about how we'd like</div><div>the WG culture to be and have the WG run. I found it useful to have.</div><div><br></div><div>I'd like to clarify a couple points here, however, since there are a few subtleties.</div><div><br></div><div>First, in at least theory in the IETF, work always happens on the mailing list for</div><div>working groups. This is part of the formal IETF process. Specifically, all consensus</div><div>calls and decisions have to be done or at least re-done/confirmed on the mailing list.</div><div>Juliusz did a fine job of emphasizing why that is the case - to encourage participation of those who aren't</div><div>traveling, to allow those whose written English is more persuasive or clear than</div><div>their spoken to more easily participate, to let technical points be seen clearly</div><div>without regard to presentation skills, and so on.</div><div><br></div><div>Second, running code is great - but its lack shouldn't stand as a barrier to writing</div><div>a draft or suggesting an idea. A long time ago, the IETF Routing Area required that</div><div>any standards-track draft have two independent implementations in order for work to</div><div>proceed. Bill Fenner and Alex Zinin wrote an RFC that removed that requirement,</div><div>but it is still up to the Working Group Chairs to set policy for their WGs as to when</div><div>drafts can progress out of the WG. For instance, in IDR, it is still required that there</div><div>are two implementations. BESS just recently added a requirement for at least one</div><div>implementation.</div><div><br></div><div>There can be a bit of a cycle where putting a feature in code makes it harder to be</div><div>willing to change or update a draft based upon others' technical concerns. It can</div><div>also be faster to write a draft, get improvements and agreement on the idea, and then</div><div>go write code. How this works can vary.</div><div><br></div><div>In the Babel WG, I think that there are enough motivated people that testing ideas</div><div>out in code and discussing them will likely happen. This is where setting the culture</div><div>of the WG comes in. </div><div><br></div><div>Regards,</div><div>Alia</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">
-Toke<br>
</font></span><div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br>
_______________________________________________<br>
babel mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:babel@ietf.org">babel@ietf.org</a><br>
<a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/babel" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/babel</a><br>
</div></div></blockquote></div><br></div></div>