Summary

  • On 24 September the IESG moved the active PROCON working group's recharter into external review, asked for comments by 4 October and said it had made no determination.
  • Datatracker identifies revision 01 as the approved charter and 01-00 as the proposal. The latter still displays three June 2026 submission targets, before the September review began.
  • A planned 8 October IESG telechat is a consideration point, not an approval. The visible dates invite a precise schedule question, not an allegation of missed deliverables.

Three June milestones sit beneath a September invitation to comment. The proposed PROCON charter still lists June 2026 for sending RFC2026bis, RFC2418bis and an IETF Chair delegation document to the IESG as Best Current Practice proposals. The IESG's 24 September announcement, meanwhile, asks the community to comment on the recharter by 4 October. Read together, those records show that the schedule printed in the proposal is already historical when the proposal reaches external review. They do not show why it was retained or establish whether any document was submitted on time.

The distinction between a working group and its charter revision is equally important. PROCON remains an active IETF group. Its current approved charter is revision 01. Datatracker marks 01-00 as a proposed recharter in external review and explicitly labels 01 the current approved text. An interested reader who cites the newest document as the operative mandate would skip the decision that has not happened. The IESG's own notice says it has made no determination.

There is a real textual change, but it is not the event examined here. Comparing the approved and proposed charter texts adds a sentence requiring the eventual RFC2026bis and RFC2418bis documents to describe current policy accurately. BTW has already reported the classification problem that sentence raises. This new article follows a different object: when a proposed authority change becomes public for comment, how does the public tell which scope is in force and which timetable remains meaningful?

The rest of the proposal helps frame a useful response. It retains the pair of process-RFC consolidations, permits non-editorial revisions around working-group milestones and adoption of drafts, requires another recharter for additional items, and keeps an IETF Chair delegation and temporary-succession BCP in scope. Those are boundaries on proposed work, not a declaration that the successor documents have been adopted. The June dates should be read as displayed targets, not as an automatic verdict on performance.

Datatracker's history records the external-review transition on 24 September, closure of a readiness ballot, creation of an approval ballot, and a move of the telechat date from 24 September to 8 October. Ballot creation and an agenda slot are not approval. The public sequence now has two separate clocks: the 4 October comment cutoff and the planned 8 October IESG consideration. Either may be followed by revision or further process.

A strong comment would therefore name the exact revision, identify a concrete ambiguity and request a checkable disposition. For the schedule, that could mean asking whether the three June targets are historical reference points, should be reset in the proposed charter, or are to be accompanied by a published explanation. This is an editorial test for legibility, not a demand that the IESG adopt any particular date. The essential point is modest: a public review should let participants inspect the authority being proposed without mistaking old dates or an open ballot for a completed decision.

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