The Area Directors often employ directorates and review teams for assistance in tasks such as
Document reviews as a part of their AD or IESG reviews, or to solicit architectural input when the document is in its early stages.
Discussion forum to talk about topics associated with a particular technology.
Help in forming an opinion about a rechartering or WG approval decision.
Tracking discussion and efforts related to a particular topic.
These teams can be created at the request of the Area Directors. Typically both ADs for an area decide to create a team, but sometimes the teams are more focused on one AD's topics, or even serve multiple areas. The teams comprise experienced members of the IETF and the technical community. The ADs are responsible for the selection of the team members.
For efficient management, the teams typically need a chair. This could be one of the ADs or one of the team members. Experience tells us that review teams need to have an active person responsible for the assignment and tracking of review tasks. The nature of the team determines how large it can be. Most directorates are of size that can easily meet for dinner at an IETF, but review teams can have a large pool of reviewers. It is the AD's task to ensure that the membership of the team is up to date and active. It is typically easy to get members and have them perform initial work, but sometimes some members drop out of active work in the directorate, or even the entire directorate grows old and tired.
Note that when the team produces a review that an AD uses as as a part of his or her AD tasks, the AD needs to understand the review and treat it critically. For instance, when the Gen AD receives a GEN-ART review, he needs to evaluate whether the issues brought up in the review are relevant and how serious they are. Some issues may lead to a DISCUSS, for instance, while other issues may be serious in the reviewer's opinion, but the AD makes a judgement call that they can not block the document. Some further comments can be noted as a editorial comments that are forwarded to the RFC Editor when the document is approved. More generally, the directorates or review teams have no formal status in the IETF. Getting a blessing from a particular directorate is not a requirement for a document's approval, for instance. They can only provide input for the AD to make the actual decision. It is often useful to treat the directorate comments and reviews as public comments (e.g. WGLC or IETF LC comments) and post them to the relevant mailing list. This is particularly useful for reviews and comments related to early reviews.
The datatracker contains a current list of directorates and review teams. Each AD should make sure that the descriptions of the teams he or she is managing are up to date. Updates to the descriptions can be sent via the IETF Chair.
Example directorate charter and description can be found in http://www.ietf.org/IESG/content/mobdir.html. Useful experiences from running a review team are described in http://www.alvestrand.no/ietf/gen/art/draft-doria-genart-experience-01.txt. The official definition for the role of directorates can be found from RFC 2418 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2418.txt.
The content of this page was last updated on 2018-08-13. It was migrated from the old Trac wiki on 2023-02-17.