"Tiny" working groups

[Michael StJohns <msj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi -

Sitting in on the various DISPATCH and DISPATCH-like discussions, I came 
to a conclusion that we may be doing ourselves a disservice in the way 
we think of WGs. I.e., one size fits all.

Quite a number of the conclusions on the documents or topics were sort 
of of the form "could use a WG, but none exists - maybe create one",  
but that comes with a lot of overhead.  E.g. space at the F2F meetings, 
chairs, AD oversight, perhaps an overly broad focus? (I intentionally 
ignore mailing lists and github repos here as the cost is negligent for 
the operation).

What if we define a class of "tiny" WGs, laser focused on a single 
topic, with a very short timeframe and with a small (2-3?) permitted 
number of documents ALL due at the same time, and with a single chair?  
 No extensions, no recharters, feet to the fire.  Easier to get 
chartered, impossible to live more than say 18 months.  Participants 
agree to a bit more "chair is in charge" than we usually see or need.  
Ideally, chair is a facilitator, not a participant and/or editor and 
chosen by the AD for that purpose.   Chair can kill the WG if progress 
isn't being made on schedule.

At any given F2F meeting, there would be 1 or 2 sessions where each tiny 
WG would get no more than 15 minutes of talk-talk time.  Any tiny WG 
ending before the next F2F would get 30 minutes and that would feed into 
an area review of the documents.

Any tiny WG past its expiration date would be required to focus only on 
resolving last-call comments from various reviews - no feature creep 
permitted.   Datatracker would identify "tiny WG" sourced documents for 
the area and ADs would have a set of rules specific to those.

This is sort of a half-formed thought.  It's still *mostly* within the 
way the IETF does things from the document point of view, but narrows 
the focus of a given tiny WG from the broad to the specific.  And lets 
us treat different topics - differently.

Thoughts?

Mike