draft-santitoro-rap-policy-errorcodes-01.txt

["Mark L. Stevens" <mstevens@ellacoya.com>]

Concerning the recent submission:

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-santitoro-rap-policy-errorcodes-01.txt

The IETF is about improving interoperability on the Internet.
Interoperability is achieved through collaboration and public review of
standards proposals. These statements may seem obvious to you, but I
make them now to reiterate the need for an ongoing discussion on this
mailing list.

Recently, a number of drafts have been submitted to this working group.
In the coming days I will introduce these drafts with a mail message
similar this one. Although I know that many of us are busily
implementing, I must ask that we take the time to read these drafts and
comment on them on rap@ops.ietf.org  mailing list.

As the co-chair of the working group, I have the responsibility to
evaluate the technical merit of submissions and evaluate the consensus
of the working group regarding these submissions, but I cannot fulfill
this responsibility without your help. So, let's begin the discussion.
Please comment and give your perspectives.

I would like to encourage all of those who monitor this mailing list to
become participants. Please dare to contribute in English, even if your
first language is not English. We are engineers, we pride ourselves on
expressing ourselves in precise programming languages, but programming
languages and their mechanical interpreters are far inferior to the ones
built in to our own brains. So, do your best to write what you mean, and
do your best to understand what others mean by what they  have written.
If we really want to promote interoperability we need to participate,
rather simply monitor and wait for proposals to be called standards.

The draft referenced above is not in the current working group charter,
but as we approach the completion of the milestones and goals outlined
in the charter, we need to decide whether or not the work we have done
to date warrants or requires fine tuning and augmentation to make it
truly usable in internetworking. So, I am going to look for active
discussion in the coming weeks to determine whether or not we should
accept any or all of the pending draft submission as new working group
work items. If discussion demonstrates consensus to do so, I will
initiate the process to add work items to the charter. If there is no
discussion, or discussion indicates that interest and need is not
present, the working group will complete its current work items and
close down.

Admittedly, it looks to me as though one or more of the drafts pending
in this working group would serve to round out the COPS work making it a
valuable tool, but I cannot proceed unilaterally. So, let's begin the
discussion.

Please begin the discussion by replying to this message and be sure to
reply to all so that the mailing list is included. Also, please omit
this text from your response. The subject line should be sufficient
reference.

Thank you,

-Mark Stevens  (RAP working group co-chair)