Re: [Rfced-future] Scope and IETF 108 proposals

[Martin Thomson <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Jul 2, 2020, at 23:12, Eliot Lear wrote:
> The E in IETF is Engineering and not Editing. We attract engineers to 
> standardize specifications. In what way do you believe we attract 
> people from the world of editing/publishing to incur the expense of 
> participating?*

Given what I've been doing for the past N years, I'm not sure that I find the stark binary characterization here very flattering.

But I think that the "editor" label is another thing that is doing us a disservice in this discussion.  There are many meanings we are talking about:

* My contributions as "editor" of a specification are exactly the sorts of contributions that we expect people in the community to provide.

* The contributions of the RPC in finishing a document are exactly the sorts of contributions that we should expect to pay for.  That includes the copy-editing pieces and all the publication pieces.

* The point on which I think we have disagreement is regarding "editorial control" akin to the roles taken on by lead editors in journals or news publications.  That is, choices regarding content: what content to fund, what content to publish, and what content to promote.

Regarding this last one, I believe that Ekr's argument is that this function is largely done for us by the streams and not any RSE.  That being the case, I thoroughly agree.  Assuming [1] is an accurate reflection of the Nevil and Brian's views, then I think that this view has fairly wide support, aside from perhaps Mike, who has expressed support for an entity with greater control over content.

[1] Section 5 of Nevil's proposal here: https://www.ietf.org/id/draft-brownlee-rfc-series-and-rse-changes-01.html#name-independence-of-the-rse