| Internet-Draft | An Update on Milestones | April 2024 |
| Schinazi | Expires 28 October 2024 | [Page] |
As mandated in RFC 2418, working group charters currently contain milestones. However, these milestones are often sufficiently out of date that they no longer provide value. This document exists to facilitate a community discussion around the future of milestones. This document could potentially update RFC 2418.¶
This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.¶
The latest revision of this draft can be found at https://davidschinazi.github.io/draft-schinazi-update-on-milestones/draft-schinazi-update-on-milestones.html. Status information for this document may be found at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-schinazi-update-on-milestones/.¶
Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at https://github.com/DavidSchinazi/draft-schinazi-update-on-milestones.¶
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As mandated in Section 2.2 of [RFC2418], a working group charter "enumerates a set of milestones together with time frames for their completion". That document also leans heavily on milestones as a process mechanism that dictates how a working group spends its time and conducts its business. However, more than 15 years after the publication of that document, the reality is often different. Milestones are now commonly ignored, and often insufficiently updated to the point of irrelevance. Since 2020, it has been possible for some working groups to use dateless milestones (see [DATELESS]). Since current usage has diverged significantly from the requirements mandated by [RFC2418], it seems valuable that we update that document to the current community consensus, assuming such consensus exists. This document currently describes possible options as a way to facilitate this community discussion, and if such a consensus were to emerge, this document would then update [RFC2418].¶
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.¶
At the time of writing this document, the current normative language around milestones is in Section 2.2 of [RFC2418]:¶
The working group charter MUST establish a timetable for specific work items. While this may be renegotiated over time, the list of milestones and dates facilitates the Area Director's tracking of working group progress and status, and it is indispensable to potential participants identifying the critical moments for input. Milestones shall consist of deliverables that can be qualified as showing specific achievement; e.g., "Internet-Draft finished" is fine, but "discuss via email" is not. It is helpful to specify milestones for every 3-6 months, so that progress can be gauged easily. This milestone list is expected to be updated periodically (see Section 5 of [RFC2418]).¶
Milestones were designed as a tool to share information from the corresponding working group to various interested parties. When milestones are years out of date, they can no longer serve that purpose. They can also cause harm if someone interprets them as being timely when they are in fact out of date.¶
The list of potential paths forward below is meant as a mostly exchaustive list of options that the author was aware of at the time of writing. If you think of one that isn't listed, please notify the author so it can be added.¶
As is often the case, the simplest path forward is to do nothing at all. It has the advantage of requiring the least work, but the obvious downside of not addressing the issues described in Section 3.¶
One potential solution to the issue of out of date milestones is, unsurprisingly, to update the milestones often enough. This solution has the advantage of not requiring community consensus to update RFC 2418. Since working chairs serve at the discretion of the Area Director, it is absolutely within the area directors' mandate to request that chairs update milestones. However, since chairs are a volunteer unpaid position, they might not always have the time to fulfill all the tasks requested by their responsible area director. The IESG would need to demonstrate the benefits of up-to-date milestones in order to motivate their use.¶
The overwhelming majority of milestones currently on the datatracker are specific to a given draft. The datatracker even includes tooling that allows attaching a draft to a milestone as an "associated document". This tooling could be enhanced to automatically update the milestone based on the status of the corresponding document. However, this begs the question: if the relevant information is already available in the datatracker, what is the purpose of duplicating it in a milestone?¶
The current datatracker tooling that allows dateless milestones appears to be in violation of the RFC 2418 text quoted above. While this is not a critical issue in and of itself, it helps motivate updating RFC 2418. We could update RFC 2418 to reflect the reality of our current process.¶
Another potential update to RFC 2418 would be to make milestones optional. Since some area directors find milestones helpful and others do not, we could have the best of both worlds by formally making milestones optional: they would then be enabled or disabled for each working group on a case-by-case basis. The responsible area director would decide whether to enable milestones or not, though they should involve the working group chairs in that decision as milestones can only be successful is chairs update them.¶
Making milestones optional allows removing them from working groups that would otherwise perpetually have out-of-date milestones, while retaining them when the chairs do keep them up-to-date.¶
Another more drastic option would be to remove milestones entirely from the datatracker, and update RFC 2418 to no longer mention them.¶
During the 15 years that have gone by since RFC 2418 was published, many aspects of the IETF process have changed. At this point, some portions of RFC 2418 now feel anachronistic. As a random example, working group minutes are theoretically required to be encoded in ASCII, and that almost never happens any more in order to allow using the names of working group members that require different character sets. Similarly, RFC 2418 still requires chairs to circulate an attendance list (also known as the "blue sheets"), a task that has now been automated.¶
While such small points do help motivate updating RFC 2418, it is unclear if much larger changes would be beneficial.¶
Based on the above, the author currently believes that the best path forward would be to update RFC 2418 to both make milestones optional, and codify the availability of dateless milestones. Making such a change would require IETF consensus.¶
Readers of the datatracker REALLY SHOULD NOT make important decisions based solely on the status of working group milestones as those could be out of date.¶
This document has no IANA actions.¶
Some of the contents of this document were inspired by a presentation given by Adam Roach at the WG Chairs’ Forum at IETF 103 in November 2018.¶