Re: Appeal Response to Abdussalam Baryun regarding draft-ietf-manet-nhdp-sec-threats

[Jari Arkko <[e-mail]>]

Toerless, SM, and others who commented on the importance of recognising people who made contributions: I fully agree, of course. Giving credit for contributions, be it about being the developer of a major protocol, having your name on the author list, or being mentioned in the acknowledgments is one of the currencies that help draw people into doing work at the IETF. Along with people's need to get an internetworking problem solved, of course. And the needs for their software to interwork with others. And the needs of their users being met…

Anyway, back to acknowledgments. We should, of course, give credit for contributions. I hope we all think about this long and hard when we write our documents, and do the right thing. Erring on the side of being inclusive is probably a better strategy for most cases.

The issue in this case though was where to draw the line. As an example, for my documents, I've mostly used a strategy where I acknowledge the significant contributions. I've occasionally used another approach, essentially listing everyone who had done any work relating to the document, no matter how small. I think either model is defensible, but there will always be a question of what contributions meet the criteria for being included. Should I acknowledge someone if they post a review that said everything is OK? A comment on the mailing list that they support this document? A suggestion that did not result in a change in the document? A minor editorial fix? A question? An argument? We do not have a definition of what kinds of things should result in your name being listed in the acknowledgments. And I don't think we should formalise that either. It is a better model to have the authors make common sense decisions about these matters. And, as with any topic, if there is a mistake there are several opportunities to rectify the situation if after analysis it seems that a mistake was made. But only if it were a clear mistake - I think it would be a bad model if the IESG or someone else were to micromanage this. The documents are WG's documents and author's documents.

Jari