Counting 3GPP contributions — even the “authorized” form — doesn’t measure 5G management and worth

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It has been a couple of years since I final mentioned how 3GPP contribution counting is a flawed apply and why it shouldn’t be used to judge an organization’s management in expertise improvements.

The important thing level is that 3GPP specs will not be based mostly on the direct acceptance or rejection of particular person member contributions, however quite the progressive and collaborative refinement of progressively accepted core ideas.

Technical Paperwork (TDocs) — written contributions to 3GPP conferences — typically are merely “famous” even when the ideas they suggest are accepted by the working group. It is a very basic proven fact that some within the business have apparently missed. Different forms of technical paperwork seize dialogue outcomes involving a number of firms. At a later stage, sometimes after a 3GPP Launch is “frozen,” Change Requests (CRs) enhance the standard of specs, with solely a small subset of them introducing improvements. Merely counting contributions additionally fails to provide credit score to those who are constructing consensus and driving these core ideas towards the ultimate specs.

All through this weblog put up, we’ll check with our earlier weblog put up on contribution counting, what modified in 3GPP since then, how 3GPP operates, and the way the newer development in “authorized contribution counting” can also be unreliable.

Making a expertise normal in 3GPP includes a posh, collaborative, and consensus-driven course of.

Taking motion to fight contribution counting

Lately, it has been encouraging to see 3GPP’s acknowledgement of the problems stemming from contribution counting, which we referenced in earlier weblog posts. Specifically, it ended up being extensively observed that some member firms had been artificially inflating the variety of their contributions, for instance, by splitting one technical contribution into a number of contributions. To mitigate such conduct, 3GPP management instituted countermeasures throughout completely different working teams. Since 2017, as an illustration, in 3GPP RAN1, every firm is proscribed to creating just one contribution per assembly agenda merchandise. In different phrases, a de-facto “contribution cap” exists, equal to the variety of distinct agenda objects. Different working teams later launched comparable guidelines. These new guidelines of engagement had been efficient and just about put an finish to the phenomenon of inflated contribution numbers.

Nonetheless, outdoors 3GPP, the apply of counting contributions sadly saved evolving. For the remainder of this weblog put up, we’ll deal with the brand new variants which have come to prominence in sure circles.

Contributions don’t inform the entire story

Earlier than we additional analyze how contribution counting has modified, it’s essential to grasp how technical specs are created inside 3GPP. I’ve beforehand talked about this in in depth element in my weblog sequence, however let me recap under:

• Usually, a bunch of firms begins a brand new 3GPP venture for a particular expertise space (e.g., 5G NR in unlicensed spectrum, 5G for drones, 5G for XR, and many others.) by proposing a brand new Examine Merchandise or a brand new Work Merchandise within the applicable group. That is often pushed by both a acknowledged business want (e.g., enhance protection in sure conditions) or when an organization, or group of firms, shares the result of their early analysis and leads the whole ecosystem down a brand new path.
• As soon as a venture is authorized, both as a Examine Merchandise or as a Work Merchandise, any 3GPP member firm can contribute concepts towards it.
• The 3GPP course of is such that each particular person part of the venture is debated, mentioned, and determined individually, based mostly on technical benefit. This happens by way of face-to-face conferences, on-line conferences, offline discussions, and written contributions. For every venture, there are a whole lot, if not hundreds, of such micro-decisions. Importantly, these micro-decisions will not be captured as “authorized” paperwork, as additional defined under.
• A specification editor, who can generally be the “rapporteur” of the venture, or a so-called “characteristic lead,” captures the gathering of agreements from this massive variety of discussions and incorporates them first into a brief doc. Sooner or later in time, in sure working teams, agreements had been captured in paperwork referred to as “approach ahead.” That is when some TDocs are literally “authorized,”

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