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Internet Drafts & IPSP work


  There are a number of folks participating in the IPSP work who are
perhaps fairly new to the IETF and the IETF way of doing things.  So
let me encourage those folks to get and read "The Tao of the IETF" and
the other introductory documents (either online or whilst at the IETF
in Amsterdam).

  The IETF process is significantly different from ANSI/ISO/CCITT
processes.  In particular, ALL working drafts and ALL proposals should
normally be kept online as Internet Drafts.  It is not generally
acceptable practice to only put something out as an Internet Draft only
after the group has "blessed" or "reached consensus" or what have you.

  Also, anyone can put out almost anything as an Internet Draft (there
are minimal syntax and format rules which are available online).  The
reason for this is that the preferred and standard way of distributing
proposals and working documents is online from the Internet Drafts
directory.  

  These practices permit everyone on the Internet to read and review
all the drafts easily.  The larger peer review of folks outside the
working group is desirable and leads to better specifications.  So I
stress that the existence of something as an Internet Draft does not
make it "preferred" or "blessed" but rather just means that it is
something that folks in the working group should be reading and
discussing.  Note also that all new Internet Drafts will be announced
by the IETF Secretariat to the entire IETF and so will almost
certainly get wider review than just the working group (again, this is
a feature).

  During the development of MIME, there were several different
Internet Drafts at the same time that proposed different ways of doing
multimedia/multilingual email.  Some proposals became Internet
standards-track RFCs, some became informational RFCs, and some
eventually died because the consensus was that they were not worth
implementing or documenting as RFCs.  The point is that making all the
working documents and drafts (even competing drafts) available online
as Internet Drafts helps make the IETF process one of the most open on
the planet and thereby helps the IETF develop really good specs that
are readable and that will actually be implemented widely.

  So my earlier suggestion that we see Paul's draft and an SP3 like
draft and a swIPe draft is really a suggestion that the group operate
in a manner consistent with the normal IETF process.

Regards,

  Ran
  atkinson@itd.nrl.navy.mil