Re: "community" for the RFC series

[Michael StJohns <[e-mail]>]

Hi Stephen - I hope I've gotten far enough back in this thread to make a 
sensible comment on the topic and sorry for the top post, but I couldn't 
figure where place to paste the various items.

My concern about the broader community is not so much characterizing or 
enumerating them, or binding them into our discussions on the RFC 
Series, but more about ensuring that our (IETF, IAB, IRTF, etc) 
parochial views of the RFC series as authors/users does not limit the 
usefulness of the series to that broader community (e.g. by doing what's 
important to us and only that, without considering what might be 
important to them). As long as the RFC editor was somewhat independent, 
I was pretty sure that there would be resistance to imposing a narrower 
world view (e.g. to bring the RFC series more in line with what the IETF 
needs/wants/demands at the expense of somewhat undefined more global needs).

I think you've got a good grasp on the problem - and I like your 
discussion points with Christian below - I think they're on target.

one more point for thought:  A given document or book generally has a 
somewhat limited community of some sorts - authors, implementers, 
reviewers, teachers, students.  A library - by it's nature - has a much 
broader community, even if you might not be able to enumerate or 
characterize each one.   Maybe that's a better model for thinking of 
some parts of the RFC Editor model?

Later, Mike

On 10/4/2019 5:17 PM, Stephen Farrell wrote:
> Hiya,
>
> On 04/10/2019 19:21, Christian Huitema wrote:
>> On 10/4/2019 2:31 AM, Stephen Farrell wrote:
>>> On 04/10/2019 08:51, Christian Huitema wrote:
>>>> I have heard Brian Carpenter's argument that if there is not an
>>>> authorship community, there is a readership community. That leaves me
>>>> skeptical. Clearly, authors and publishers should care about their
>>>> readership, and I wish we had better ways to assess the impact of our
>>>> publications. But passive readership does not create a community, no
>>>> more than me reading ITU publications makes me part of the ITU
>>>> community. What creates a community is engagement, contributions and
>>>> sharing.
>>> I guess I disagree with you there Christian - ISTM that
>>> at the very least, people who read RFCs and write related
>>> code that is part of many network stacks, but who do not
>>> engage with the IETF or RFC editor at all, do deserve more
>>> consideration than you imply. I can see arguments for a
>>> bigger set of people deserving consideration but omitting
>>> the above example set seems just broken to me.
>>
>> Sure,
> As in: you agree that particular set of people do deserve
> consideration in the upcoming discussion? If so, I think
> that's correct.
>
> But, that implies we should also be thinking if there are
> other sets of folks (adding up <<7.7 billion:-) who similarly
> deserve consideration.
>
>> but if they don't somehow communicate, how do you know they are there?
> For the set I mentioned? Do you really doubt they're there?
> I do not.
>
>> And if they do communicate, the question is "with whom"?
> I don't think that's a question we need address at all. That's
> just their business.
>
>> Where do they
>> send the message saying that they are trying to implement protocol FOO
>> but they don't get what section 3.1.5 of RFC XXXX really means?
>> Slashdot? Stack overflow? Some Reddit group?
> Yes. stackexchange etc. mostly at present it seems. It'd
> once have been things like Dr. Dobbs magazine and/or
> comp.<various> via usenet I guess.
>
>> Actually, it would be very
>> nice if the IETF had a documented feedback channel for such exchanges.
>> That would be a nice way to grow the community.
> We did discuss exactly that (a stackexchange <something>) at
> the IAB retreat - not for IETF process-wonkery like this, but
> for protocols that are widely used like HTTP. I think someone
> there was gonna look into it but can't recall if anything's
> been done since. I can totally such a channel working for HTTP
> or maybe DNS, but I'd guess not for this discussion. Might be
> worth a try regardless though, even if it didn't work for this
> discussion, we'd learn HOWTO.
>
> I do however have a glib answer for how we could try communicate
> with people who read some RFCs but who don't otherwise get at all
> involved... we write an RFC. Maybe one describing the upcoming
> discussion and try see if promoting that in various places gets
> any feedback. So there may be a case for writing charter-like
> text for the upcoming discussion in an RFC (I guess that'd be
> an IAB-stream RFC if we did it).
>
> For other subsets of people, other mechanisms will I guess be
> needed, hence me wondering if it'd be good to try characterise
> better who might really be in that "bigger" community. We seem
> to have identified at least one set of people already so maybe
> it'll not be too hard to find more sets or agree we've found
> enough.
>
> Cheers,
> S.
>
>
>
>> -- Christian Huitema
>>
>>