Re: "community" for the RFC series

[Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]>]

Hiya,

Answers to Brian, John, and Christian (from the other
thread) below...

On 03/10/2019 23:40, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>>>    A first important consequence is that major decisions about the
>>>    future of the RFC Series must be taken by a consensus of a very broad
>>>    community.  That doesn't mean the IETF or the IAB.  It means the IETF
>>>    and IAB, plus the IRTF, plus many other people who have contributed
>>>    to, or made use of, the RFC Series over the last fifty years.  How to
>>>    reach out to this community is in itself a big question.
>>
>> Do you think that's a different set of people than "RFC
>> readers"? If so, how?
> 
> As you hint below, implementors may in effect be part of the 
> RFC user community even if they don't actually read the text.
> And other such as lobbyists and politicians in some cases.
> And consumer advocates. So the boundary is bound to be fuzzy.
> I don't think there's any point in trying to define it precisely;
> we just have to recognise that it's not just "us" for any
> reasonable definition of "us", so we have a broad responsibility.

I think I disagree about the level of fuzziness that's ok here.
If we extend to all 7.7 billion people then there's no way in
the world anyone could really consult the non-IETF bits of the
community. So I think I'd argue that a direct connection to the
RFC series (e.g. being a reader) is needed if we're to get a
common understanding of this bigger community.

Yes, that'd omit some who implement from stackexchange but that
might be good enough. Personally, I have absolutely no problem
not including lobbyists in our description of that community. (But
note that this need not be exclusionary - all that lobbyist has
to do is read an RFC to get back in:-)

On 04/10/2019 00:22, John C Klensin wrote:
> I would suggest that it implies not only "readers of RFCs"
> (your categorization later in your note) but everyone who
> is dependent on them.

But that is basically the entire planet, right? (So same point
as I made above seems to me to apply.) But if I'm wrong, can
you help me understand (e.g. via examples) who you think is in,
and not in, the community as you envisage it?

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.

Cheers,
S.