General Area Dispatch (gendispatch)

WG Name General Area Dispatch
Acronym gendispatch
Area General Area (gen)
State Active
Charter charter-ietf-gendispatch-02 Approved
Document dependencies
Additional resources Issue tracker, Wiki, Zulip stream
Personnel Chairs Martin Vigoureux, Shuping Peng
Area Director Roman Danyliw
Mailing list Address [email protected]
To subscribe https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/gendispatch
Archive https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/gendispatch/
Chat Room address https://zulip.ietf.org/#narrow/stream/gendispatch

Charter for Working Group

The GENDISPATCH working group is a DISPATCH-style working group (see RFC 7957)
chartered to consider proposals for new work in the GEN area, including
proposals for changes or improvements to the IETF process and process documents.
GENDISPATCH is chartered to identify, or to help create, an appropriate venue
for new work. GENDISPATCH will not consider any technical standardization work.

Guiding principles for proposed new work include:

  1. Providing a clear problem statement, historical context, motivation, and
    deliverables for the proposed new work.

  2. Ensuring there has been adequate mailing list discussion reflecting
    sufficient interest, enough individuals have expressed a willingness to
    contribute (if appropriate given the subject matter of the proposal) and
    there is WG consensus before new work is dispatched.

  3. Looking for and identifying commonalities and overlap among published or
    ongoing work in the GEN area, the IESG, the IAB, the IETF LLC, the IRTF,
    other SDOs, or the wider technical community.

Options for handling new work include:

  • Directing the work to an existing WG.

  • Developing a proposal for a BOF.

  • Developing a charter for a new WG.

  • Making recommendations that documents be AD-sponsored (which ADs may or may
    not choose to follow).

  • Requesting that relevant bodies, including but not limited to the IESG, the
    IAB, the IRTF, or the IETF LLC, consider taking up the work in some form.

  • Deferring the decision for the new work.

  • Rejecting the new work.

If GENDISPATCH decides that a particular topic needs to be addressed by a new
WG, the normal IETF chartering process will be followed, including, for
instance, IETF-wide review of the proposed charter. Proposals for large work
efforts SHOULD lead to a BOF where the topic can be discussed in front of the
entire IETF community. Documents progressed as AD-sponsored would typically
include those that are extremely simple or make minor updates to existing
process documents.

Proposed new work may be deferred in cases where GENDISPATCH does not have
enough information for the chairs to determine consensus. New work may be
rejected in cases where there is not sufficient interest in GENDISPATCH or the
proposal has been considered and rejected in the past, unless a substantially
revised proposal is put forth, including compelling new reasons for accepting
the work.

A major objective of GENDISPATCH is to provide timely, clear dispositions of new
efforts. Thus, where there is consensus to take on new work, GENDISPATCH will
strive to quickly find a home for it (usually within a few months). While most
new work in the GEN area is expected to be considered in GENDISPATCH, there may
be times when that is not appropriate. At the discretion of the GEN AD, new
efforts may follow other paths. For example, work may go directly to a BOF, may
be initiated in other working groups when it clearly belongs in that group, or
may be directly AD-sponsored.

While it is inevitable that some discussion of the merits of a proposal brought
to GENDISPATCH are necessary in order to evaluate the appropriate disposition of
the proposal, GENDISPATCH is not chartered to actually do the work proposed.
As part of the dispatch, a venue for further discussion should be identified.

The existence of GENDISPATCH does not change the IESG's responsibilities and
discretion as described in RFC 3710. Work related to the IAB, IRTF, and RFC
Editor processes is out of scope, but when discussions in GENDISPATCH identify
such work items, they can be suggested to those bodies for action.