BoF scheduling emails identify the group as a Working Group

[martinthomson]

Describe the issue

I just received an email that appears to claim that PTTH is a working group:

A new meeting session request has just been submitted by Liz Flynn, on behalf
of the PTTH Working Group.

This is misleading. It's not great having "official" communications like this carrying that sort of misrepresentation. Had I not been paying more attention, I might have inferred that I missed an approval.

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow the IETF's Code of Conduct

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Aggregated with agent assistance on 2026-08-10

[rjsparks]

This is fair, and an artifact of the way modeling bofs that has existed since the very early days of the datatracker. They are modeled as groups of type wg in state bof. All places that emit information about the group have to switch carefully on that state. That the email doesn't do that is a bug that we'll address.

For future consideration: an alternative model would be to have a group of type bof, instead of it being a state of a group of type wg, but it raises the complication of having a group change type during its history - something that the codebase currently assumes never happens. (Using a group replaces doesn't work as many bofs that do become wg want to keep the acronym)

[martinthomson]

I don’t think that the idea of a state, independent of a type is bad. It’s just that you have to be more careful about the string used in presentation. If there was a unified way to retrieve that string, you don’t have to change the structure, just the clients.

[russhousley]

This seems to be a way to weal with the current situation:

    group_type = group.type.verbose_name
    if group_type == "Working Group" and group.state_id == "bof":
        group_type = group.state_id.upper()

[evyncke]

LoL, I was about to fix the issue with the same kind of code ;-)