IETF 61 General Area Open Meeting Minutes

Welcome, and introduction - Harald Alvestrand

• Henrik asked to broaden his presentation to cover upcoming Tools team projects.
• We flipped the order of agenda items to match presenters who were actually in the room at the time
  

• Goal is to reduce Secretariat overhead, post in seconds, not in days, painlessly, consistently, reliably, and collecting meta-information on the way
• Avoid surprises (drafts that don't look like we expect them to). Accept XML, along with other formats.
  
• Providing web interface and e-mail submission, verify sender's e-mail, check nits automatically, provide manual posting as a last resort.
• Trial - 45-day goal is to remove Secretariat involvement from 70% of submissions, 100 days adds XML support
• Publish as Informational RFC?
• Could launch 10 weeks from now at the earliest.
• Brian Carpenter - you're being too nice - why not require XML? Paul Hoffman - A horrible thing - hard to get well-formed XML out of current tools.
• Larry Masinter - but we're trying to offload the Secretariat - we're changing policies, is this in scope?
  
• Carl Malamud- requiring XML is really more reasonable than you think
• Larry Masinter - we're encouraging XML submission by making it easier
• Spencer Dawkins - have XML submission work during "silent period"? Horrible idea, and out of scope. ("but I was JOKING!")
  
• Christian Huitema - but I don't use XML :-)
• Bill Strahm- Should be "all 00 drafts should be XML" as of some date - other mechanisms will tend to disappear.
• Henrik Levkowetz - but the canonical form is text - not reasonable to forbid it!
• Bill Strahm - getting the formatting right any other way is a nightmare...
• Margaret Wasserman - concerned about cutover dates - when do existing procedures stop working? There will be an overlap.
• Avri Doria - is XML in one file? are includes OK? Will accept external references to reference library, but XML2RFC supports resolving external references
• Tim Chown - XML at secretariat? They actually only use the text today, and not the XML at all.
• Sense of room? 1/3 support this draft, no one opposed.

• Please comment on tool priority list (http://tools.ietf.org/wiki/ToolPriotityList), especially on ordering, and comment on tools-discuss@ietf.org
• Lucy - Gen-ART reviewers worship the diffs tool - will this be included?
• Carl  - would like us to look at mailing list management (starting new ones, etc.)
• Paul - can we automate checking the archives to make sure that messages are still being recorded. There's an operations management component here, too.
• Pekka - how is this possible? Subscribe to the mailing list and cross-check the archives. (Requires SPAM checking coordination, etc.).

• Should mention the IPR status at WGLC, mandatory at IETF Last Calls
• Spencer Dawkins - are WGLCs defined? They aren't required, certainly.
• Margaret Wasserman and Avri Doria - at least our BCPs do know what WGLCs are..
• Concerned about more FUD in the process
• Larry Masinter - great idea with devils in the details. Incorrect disclosures are worse than no disclosures. It took a year to change the wording in our drafts
• Pekka Savrola - don't interpret the statements, just call attention to them.
• Larry Masinter - what tools could we use to do this automatically? Harald - we have a tool as of last week to tie IDs to IPR disclosures.
• Larry Masinter - just add a statement pointing out where to check in the Last Call text?
• Margaret Wasserman - concerned about logisitics and effectiveness - IPR claims can arrive any time, right?  Are we encouraging IPR disputes during last call? We don't encourage other interesting topics of discussion, won't this call attention to IPR at Last Call time? And we have to be so careful about characterizing the existence of IPR, because all we know about is what we've been told about...
• Christian Huitema - we don't think about IPR at submission time, we think about it at implementation time (later).
• Larry Masinter - remind people about draft standard requirements in draft standard last calls, for instance?
• Harald Alvestrand - so the concern is that we are calling special attention to IPR that's known at Last Call time?
• Brian Carpenter - I'm sympathetic in principle, but this is a red flag for outside agitators, and we've seen them before.
• Harald Alvestrand - are we making it harder to see IPR? Maybe harder, but not hard.
• Christian Huitema  - if we change anything, make it easier to identify what applies to a specific draft.
• (Harald gave a quick demo of an IPR disclosures search tool here)
• Lars-Erik Jonsson - is this too late in the process? Should we announce IPR disclosures? We're supposed to announce them to ADs, authors, WG chairs now...
• Margaret Wasserman - IPR is only one of many decisions a working group/the community needs to make.
  
• Larry Masinter - can we add this pointer to automated submissions?
  
• Brian Carpenter - duty of evaluating IPR claims actually falls on the WG - is that the right policy? Do our procedures support this?

• Should this draft be adopted as a process the IETF should follow? about three people.
  
• draft should be removed from consideration? about twenty people.
  
• should do something about this problem? almost certainly (applause for Pekka)