[hrpc] The relevance of RFCs // was: Possible options for a HRPC research publication

Niels ten Oever <mail@nielstenoever.net> Mon, 13 April 2020 11:06 UTC

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From: Niels ten Oever <mail@nielstenoever.net>
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Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2020 13:06:21 +0200
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Subject: [hrpc] The relevance of RFCs // was: Possible options for a HRPC research publication
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Hi all,

In discussions here and on other mailinglists, some have criticized the format of I-D and RFCs, the workings of the datatracker, the slightly archaic nature of mailinglists and other tools that we use. I, however, would like to shortly note how important I-D's, RFC's, mailinglists, and the datatracker have been in my research, my involvement in this field, and how extraordinary it is that it is possible to find documents, notes, and presentations going back to 1969. While there is indeed a learning curve, the reward for traveling that curve is access to a huge wealth of highly consistent information in a very structured archive. 

In many different kinds of organizations it is hardly possible to find documents from just a few years back, let alone finding them in the same format and context. This is true for NGOs, universities, private corporations, governance bodies, and sadly also governments. 

Furthermore, RFC's for me embody a relational understanding of infrastructure that combines hardware, software, and wetware, or in the vernacular of another field: technological materiality, institutional ordering, economic drivers, and epistemic communities. For me, this is an important argument to keep on using RFCs and I-Ds (and by extension also mailinglists and the datatrackers), to keep this practice alive, by testing and expanding it with new, and sometimes relevant, contributions. 

Best,

Niels


On 4/11/20 1:52 PM, Colin Perkins wrote:
>> On 11 Apr 2020, at 12:45, Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@nic.fr> wrote:
>> On Wed, Apr 08, 2020 at 11:06:22AM +0100, Colin Perkins <csp@csperkins.org> wrote a message of 352 lines which said:
>>
>>> we could also work with an appropriate academic publisher to publish
>>> archival proceedings,
>>
>> A warning: many (most?) "academic publishers" actively prevent the
>> free distribution of the articles they publish. If the RG were to
>> publish anything as a group, it MUST be in a way that will allow free
>> redistribution (as it is the case for the RFCs, see RFC 8721.) No
>> Springer-Verlag or Elsevier in the loop.
> 
> I’m well aware of these issues, but thank you for the reminder.
> 

-- 
Niels ten Oever
Researcher and PhD Candidate
DATACTIVE Research Group
University of Amsterdam

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