As a member of the routing directorate, you may be asked to review an Internet-draft at (or immediately prior to) IETF last call, or for an IESG Telechat. Such reviews are requested by the Area Directors, and your comments are supplied mainly for the benefit of the ADs. The focus of an IETF last call is to verify that a document is ready to be published as an RFC. As such, your review needs to be sufficiently careful and thorough. Last call reviews can, and often do, find significant issues with drafts that have been missed by the working groups. One of the goals of a directorate review at this stage is to provide a fresh pair of experienced eyes to make it less likely that an issue will slip through the net. However, it is equally important for the directorate review to focus and comment explicitly on the readability and understandability of a document, because (lack of) document clarity is often a major stumbling block for a draft when it is reviewed by the IESG.
There is a template for writing a last call review here.
As a member of the routing directorate, you may be asked to review an Internet draft while it is still in a working group. This could be any time between the initial poll for adoption and the working group last call. Such reviews are called "early reviews" and used to be known as "QA reviews" (a term that is still in use). Early reviews are usually requested by a working group chair, but could be requested by an AD. The purpose of an early review is to improve document quality before it gets to IETF last call. The rationale is that it is often easier and cheaper to make changes to a document while it is still in the working group. (If you are interested, you can see more details on the early review process here.)
When doing an early review, your focus should be on making high level comments for the benefit of the working group, not on polishing the document for publication. At this stage, you may expect to find problems with the spec, spot bad ideas, point out other (better) solutions, poor clarity, missing information and so on.
There is a template for writing an early review here.
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The content of this page was last updated on 2018-01-29. It was migrated from the old Trac wiki on 2022-12-20.