How to get feedback on published RFCs [resending as plaintext]

Yaron Sheffer <yaronf.ietf@gmail.com> Tue, 19 July 2016 11:54 UTC

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From: Yaron Sheffer <yaronf.ietf@gmail.com>
Subject: How to get feedback on published RFCs [resending as plaintext]
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Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 13:54:28 +0200
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Once an RFC is published, there is essentially no way for readers to 
provide feedback: what works, what are the implementation pitfalls, how 
does the document relate to other technologies or even to other RFCs.

We IETF insiders usually know what is the relevant working group, and 
can take our feedback there. Non-insiders though don't have any contact 
point, and so will most likely keep their feedback to themselves. These 
non-IETFers are the target audience of our documents! Unfortunately, our 
so-called "Requests for Comments" are anything but an invitation to 
submit comments.

There is a number of tools now that allow "web annotations" (i.e., 
comments) on various published documents. I submitted a draft [1] 
recently that proposes to enable annotations on the "tools" version of 
our RFCs. Technically, this is a trivial change. From a process point of 
view it is more complicated and merits discussion on this list. Sec. 6 
of the draft allows you to see for yourself what such annotations would 
look like.

I am here in Berlin if people prefer to talk it over in person. 
Otherwise, please reply on this list.

Thanks,
     Yaron

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-sheffer-ietf-rfc-annotations-00