Re: The IETF, Standards process, and the impact on the RFC series document production

[Michael Richardson <[e-mail]>]

Nico Williams <[e-mail]> wrote:
    > _The_ problem is that review by _volunteers_ is a time-consuming thing.
    > To get others (volunteers!) to review _your_ work you have to... also
    > volunteer to review _theirs_.  Reviewing others' work who are not also
    > employees of the same org is difficult to justify and/or account for
    > correctly.

    > As well, authors of I-Ds are almost never professional writers, and
    > they're usually not paid to write those I-Ds except as a side aspect of
    > a larger project.

    > The cost and value, of review is unaccounted, thus treated as an
    > intangible, thus difficult to arrange.

This is why I'd like to formalize the acknolwedgement process.
Formal (sector) reviews ought to clearly get reviews, and other reviews are
more of an ad-hoc situation.  Having that acknowledgement would, I think,
help justify employee time spent.  It's clearly, as you said, quid-pro-quo.

    > RFC numbers tend to become meaningless as we have more and more of
    > them.

It is difficult to know that the numbers mean when you are not in the middle
of that WG's efforts.  And, I've had to cite 7951 and 7591 in the same
document, and gotten the wrong one in the wrong place.
(Not sure if I got those right from memory. One is supposed to be JSON)

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