Re: [rfc-i] "community" for the RFC series

Henrik Levkowetz <henrik@levkowetz.com> Sat, 05 October 2019 04:38 UTC

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To: Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@gmail.com>, Christian Huitema <huitema@huitema.net>, Stephen Farrell <stephen.farrell@cs.tcd.ie>, John C Klensin <john-ietf@jck.com>
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From: Henrik Levkowetz <henrik@levkowetz.com>
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Date: Sat, 05 Oct 2019 06:38:28 +0200
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Subject: Re: [rfc-i] "community" for the RFC series
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On 2019-10-05 00:07, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> On 05-Oct-19 07:21, 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, but if they don't somehow communicate, how do you know they
>> are there?
>> 
>> And if they do communicate, the question is "with whom"? 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?
>> 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.
> 
> Yes, but it isn't just the IETF. It's all the streams, so the
> dispatcher for generic queries will have to be (at least externally)
> the RFC Editor, I think.
> 
> On the underlying point - the fuzziness of the community boundary - I
> really don't believe in magic, or that the community we should worry
> about is 7.7 billion people. But we would be deluding ourselves to
> think that we can count the members of the community; we can't even
> count the members of the IETF. So we really have to accept, IMHO,
> that there is an open-ended public service responsibility here, not
> just a responsibility to a well-defined closed community.

I agree, and it's an important point.


	Henrik

> And if an
> obscure network operator in Northern Elbonia has a comment to make on
> an RFC from 1969 tagged in the index as "(Status: UNKNOWN)", that is
> automatically part of the community discourse, even though we don't
> know which stream that RFC belongs to.
> 
> Brian
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