Thoughts on The Principle of “Divide and Conquer” Dean Willis March 2006 A Summary of Discussions on the SIPish Mailing Lists

The Complaints Stuff takes “too long” to progress through working groups, milestones missed People only work for the 3 weeks preceding each meeting Hard to get enough review Authors don’t make changes quickly Priorities not clear Chairs not doing enough management

The Suggestions Fire the chairs (Please!) or get them to manage more aggressively, providing structured guidance for reviews Have more interim meetings Exclude more work, set priorities Make a directorate Re-divide the problem space over a set of rescoped, mission-focused working groups.

The History SIP has been running since 1999, 23 full or interim meetings, 46 RFCs, 4 ADs, and 5 chairs so far SIPPING spawned in 2001 to act as a “kidney” for SIP and set priorities, 17 meetings, 32 RFCs, 2 ADs, and 4 chairs so far Both groups tried formal “design teams” as sub-working groups, with chairs, their own web pages, and so on. Failed to thrive in IETF process New work keeps showing up.

Observations We have two sessions for SIP and SIPPING at each IETF, and have done so for years. The limit on what gets done seems to be how hard the AD and chairs work at any given time. Reviewers are limited , but we exhaust management cycles before worker cycles. Our current open charters work only because they’ve been held continuously by one anchor. PROTO moves work from ADs to chairs. I wanted an interim but didn’t get it done.

Proposal Split both SIP and SIPPING working groups 4 new narrowly-chartered WGs 8 total chairs Expect chairs to manage aggressively Form an RAI or SIP Directorate to help coordinate mission, do cross-group review Hold more interim meetings

Directorate? Alternatives: RAI Area directorate SIP Directorate RAI Working Group

Proposed Group Split SIPPING Usage of SIP (examples, TISPAN howto, etc.) Requirements and Work Assignment SIP Maintenance and Wrap of SIP 2.0 Roadmap Documents Forward-looking work like SAML, E2M, Fixing the 3261 Proxy Routing Bug