Re: Possible RFC 3683 PR-action

--On Sunday, March 30, 2008 9:00 PM -0700 Doug Ewell 
<doug@ewellic.org> wrote:

> Theodore Tso <tytso at MIT dot EDU> wrote:
>
>> A valid technical concern is easy to deal with.  If they
>> provide an idea, I suspect a cautious working group chair
>> might insist on knowing their real name and company
>> affiliation, since there have been past examples where
>> companies have tried to inject patented technologies into a
>> standards specification.
>
> I suppose a few personal notes might be in order regarding
> "company  affiliation," since I've served as editor for both
> RFC 4645 and  draft-ietf-ltru-4645bis, both products of the
> LTRU Working Group that  started this thread, and both under
> the title "Consultant" instead of a  company or other
> organizational affiliation.
>
> There are a couple of reasons.  One is that my company, which
> had  apparently been embarrassed by employees posting personal
> opinions on an  industry message board in a way which made
> them sound like official  company positions, instituted a set
> of "Internet and Electronic  Communications Guidelines" some
> years ago which prohibits employees from  "stating their
> [company] affiliation over the Internet" unless required  as
> part of their job description.
>...

Doug,

Even this stringent a rule would presumably not prevent you from 
disclosing your affiliation to a WG Chair or the Secretariat if 
you were asked a specific question in order to help authenticate 
you.  If it is possible to read our rules to prevent the 
entities who might legitimately ask you for that information 
from keeping it confidential if that were reasonably required, 
then those rules may need clarification or tweaking.

But there is a huge difference between stating/ advertising a 
company affiliation in a mailing list email address or at the 
top of an RFC and responding to the sort of query that I think 
Ted's note suggests.

    john

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